In a letter “To the Editor of the Times,” a G. S. Hatton of Brompton writes furiously in May 1850:

Immediately, certain interpretive possibilities present themselves. I am sure most of my readers are struck by the possibility of bawdy jokes about an ejaculating umbrella; twenty-first-century eyes will struggle to unsee the “disgusting semi-fluid,” “propelled [as if] from a syringe” out of the tip of the leering gent's loathsome umbrella. Is Mr Hatton using the umbrella as a euphemism? If so, is that not a rather odd way of masking a sexual assault in a national newspaper? Or is this a literal account of an unpleasant occurrence? If this is truly what happened, how can we determine whether the outraged Mr Hatton was aware of the sexual connotations that present themselves so easily to us? Our modern inexorable sexual reading of the sticky umbrella stems from two circumstances: the very real sexual menace posed by a stranger who rubs himself against women's skirts in a public place (nothing funny about that), and more than a hundred years of being conditioned to notice, and snigger at, elongated objects. Since the popularisation of Sigmund Freud's theories of dream interpretation, the umbrella has been repeatedly interpreted as an unconscious substitution for the male genitals. Freud specifically mentioned umbrellas in his 1916–17 publication of A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, along with trees, poles, firearms, pencils, nail files, etc. (Freud 154–55). It was perhaps this which led Katherine Mansfield to quip in 1917 of E. M. Forster's 1910 novel Howard's End that: “I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella” (121). Mansfield's joke is on the umbrella as a phallic substitution. She equates Leonard's insecure grasp on middle-class respectability with a lack of sexual virility, while also casting aspersions on the probability of E. M. Forster's plot. But that is only half the joke. The other half of the joke is much older, that of the “fatal forgotten umbrella.” This refers back to a long tradition, as I shall show, of the unassuming umbrella as a catalyst, a plot engine with a will of its own which pitches its owner into social embarrassment, romantic entanglements or worse.

The names Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Eugène Sue (1804–1857) rarely figure in the same sentence. Carlyle is commonly remembered as a dour Scots Calvinist and eminent Victorian; Sue, in contrast, as a sensational French novelist, and sybarite-turned-champagne-socialist. Nevertheless, the following article will contend that Carlyle was in fact familiar with the works of Sue, to such an extent that he adapted passages from the latter's Mystères de Paris (1842–1843) in his own Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). First, the article will offer a brief sketch of Sue and his novel, before discussing their reception amongst Carlyle's circle of friends and acquaintances. It will then suggest that Carlyle himself was likely to have read the novel, and then proceed to compare the relevant passages of the Mystères and the Pamphlets, which together constitute the primary focus of the article. Finally, it will be argued that this matter is far from being a mere curiosity, of concern only to the most obsessive of Carlyle scholars. To the contrary, it will be suggested that in understanding what Carlyle did with Sue, we will be better able to grasp the meaning of some of the more notorious passages of his most notorious work, and particularly their political thrust. In doing so, the article will build upon a number of recent studies of the reception of French literature in Victorian Britain, and will also reopen the question of Carlyle's debts to French socialism, an issue that continues to be a matter of some controversy amongst Carlyle scholars.

You can continue to thoughtlessly pollute, Ruskin warns his readers, but in so doing you will destroy the earth and end your own existence. Six years earlier, in 1865, Ruskin coined the term “dis-ease” to denote a clear link between ill-being and environmental detachment. He yoked physical and mental health, elucidating “[h]ow literally that word Dis-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expressed the entire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!” (“Of Kings’ Treasuries” 282). For Ruskin, nineteenth-century mills and factories, despite promising consumer satisfaction, made comfort impossible by endlessly producing frivolous, disposable goods, and thus waste. This needless consumption, a symptom of industry, produced an ignorance of true needs. Dis-ease, mental and bodily discomfort, resulted from alienation from the ecosystem, the networks of dependence between all species, and that estrangement blinded human beings to their actual role in the environment. While Ruskin focused on urban toxicity, the toxic ideological separation between humans and their environment impacted all spaces, a concern that several Victorian writers raised decades earlier than he did. This article traces the salutary cultural anxiety over improper sanitation and contaminants in two popular mid-nineteenth-century novels that demonstrate the effects of anthropogenic pollution in urban and rural environments, respectively. Published almost exactly one year apart, both Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) invoke what I call eco-consciousness in their description of urban and rural filth, portrayed as both visible and invisible toxins. Gaskell uncovers urban pollution in plain sight, going beyond smell to expose the causes of toxicity, while Brontë challenges the belief in the country as a safe haven from pollution, going beyond beauty to expose rural toxicity. Characters suffer physical disease and mental dis-ease resulting from a poor understanding of ecological relationships. Reading Jane Eyre alongside Mary Barton accentuates Brontë’s use of eco-consciousness to expose the hidden dangers of rural pollution that resulted from the very types of urban toxicity that Gaskell identifies.

From May 1850 to January 1851, the Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times of London featured a series of articles entitled “A Few Words about Music” by “M. H.” The author was the governess, composer, and Catholic convert Mary Holmes (1815–1878). Over the course of several months, Holmes extolled the value of music in women's education, offered practical advice on practicing the piano, recommended suitable repertoire for students, and provided useful guidelines for teaching music to children. In 1851, the articles were expanded into a small book and published by J. Alfred Novello as A Few Words about Music: Containing Hints to Amateur Pianists; to Which Is Added a Slight Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Music, by M. H.

Letty Garth's “favourite red volume” makes its appearance in Middlemarch at the beginning of Book 7, at the Vincy's New Year's Day party that draws most of the Middlemarch town characters together. It is a small passage that can easily go unnoticed – or, if registered at all, glossed as simply part of the fabric of dense, inconsequential details that realist texts deploy to produce verisimilitude. Roland Barthes describes such details as potentially “scandalous” from the point of view of structure in that they seem to amount to “a kind of narrative luxury,” likely to threaten structural coherence, recoverable at best as “filling” or as giving “some index of character or atmosphere” (141). Such details might be said to reinforce the vices of nineteenth-century realism, including closing the gap between words and things: “we are the real,” these details say, producing “the referential illusion” (148). They amount to bad narrative housekeeping, “increasing the cost of narrative information” (141). Since the detail of Letty's book involves a young child it is doubly likely, in a novel so clearly dedicated to the adult world of compromise and doubtful success, to be set aside as mere local colour. The potentially trivializing function of the paradox of small instances of excess is reflected in Barthes’ descriptive phrases for them: “useless details,” “insignificant notation” (142).

Readers have long noted the pervasiveness of sympathy in George Eliot's work. But why always sympathy? One cannot fully answer this question without attending to a crucial and yet still understudied context for Eliot's work: evangelicalism. It is from evangelical thought and practice that she gleaned the concept of what I will call sympathetic “insight,” which evangelicals privileged for its ability to “see” the real and to move between the dichotomous barriers of the in/visible and in/external. I want to suggest that even after Eliot no longer found compelling its accompanying theology, sympathetic “insight” persisted in her imagination as a way to see into and within her realist fictional worlds.

The specter of cosmopolitanism haunts Daniel Deronda. In a curious reversal of critical fortune, the novel condemned by many of its initial reviewers for dabbling into obscure mystical doctrines and for pontificating far too explicitly about the significance of narrow loyalties and local attachments has recently come to embody a scrupulous investigation of cosmopolitan ethics. The sources of this radical shift in the understanding of Daniel Deronda’s politics are theoretical as much as they are interpretative. For some time now, humanistic scholarship has been simultaneously attracted to cosmopolitanism and embarrassed by it: while we continue to be drawn to cosmopolitanism as an ideological project invested in overcoming tribal loyalties and in celebrating the encounter with the other, we are also resistant to its universalizing logic which we often see as complicit with the hegemonic tendencies variously present in the intellectual legacy of the European Enlightenment and in contemporary global capitalism. Faced with this tension, several influential scholars –– most notably Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah –– have turned to Daniel Deronda as an example of a cosmopolitanism free of pernicious hegemonic connotations, a cosmopolitanism understood as a commitment to open exchange between nations and races, rather than as the erasure of all cultural difference. In doing so they have, however, simultaneously overextended the concept of cosmopolitanism, rendering it very nearly meaningless, and misjudged the politics of Eliot's novel, overlooking its deep commitment to the logic of ethnic nationalism. In this essay I wish to use what I take to be the dual failure — interpretative and theoretical — of recent readings of Daniel Deronda in order to reexamine both the politics of Eliot's late writings and the ways in which we use the concept of cosmopolitanism in our critical practice. I will argue, first, that the cosmopolitan Deronda, constructed in a series of influential interpretations over the past two decades, is a specter, an apparition. This phantom, as we shall see, was constructed due to an unusual alignment between the desire to dissociate the great Victorian moralist that was George Eliot from the charge of slipping into narrow nationalist worldview and the desire to recuperate a non-hegemonic vision of cosmopolitanism. Second, I will argue that the novel's much discussed marginalization of Gwendolen Harleth in favor of Daniel Deronda's nationalist mission does not constitute simply a rejection of an egotistical heroine in the name of higher duties, but rather a decisive moment in Eliot's late career and in the history of Victorian fiction: by unequivocally favoring the hero's nationalist commitments over the heroine's private struggles, George Eliot has also rejected the private sphere which has traditionally preoccupied nineteenth-century fiction, in favor of the fantasies of collective destiny. Before analyzing the full implications of this shift, however, I will outline in more detail the interpretative history in which this essay intervenes.

One of the obvious strengths of Margaret Harkness's 1887 novel A City Girl is its comprehensive visual record of London's East End. Harkness depicts Whitechapel's geography and public and residential spaces with an authority derived, as we know, from her voluntary residence in the Katharine Buildings, thinly disguised in the novel as the Charlotte Buildings. The Katherine Buildings were a block of apartments for working class tenants built by the East End Dwelling Company; Harkness lived in them for a few months in 1887 and was one of a wave of middle-class women who ventured into such residences, sometimes as employees (“lady rent collectors”) and sometimes, as with Harkness and her cousin Beatrice Potter (later Webb) as writers determined to document in fictional or non-fictional form the conditions in which the poor lived. Harkness's first-hand experience and descriptive acuity has inspired some rich and productive scholarship on A City Girl, which in the form of two scholarly editions (one recent and one forthcoming) is the subject of a modest renaissance. From a literary perspective, most scholars have grappled with the novel's generic affiliation, describing it variously as a New Woman novel, a socialist novel, a sentimental novel, and an example of English naturalism. Some of these critics – principally John Goode and Rob Breton – combine a study of the novel's generic signs with historical attention to Socialism, one of Harkness's many ambivalent and abbreviated political and institutional affiliations in the 1880s and 90s; they use the literary lens of genre study to better understand the author's political consciousness in the context of late-Victorian reform politics. Pursuing another horizon of inquiry, I turn away from the novel's documentary evidence and generic and political loyalties to its elusive but revealing study of artistic representation. It is not the sociological or political milieu of Harkness's East End heroine, Nelly Ambrose, that interests me, but the link that Harkness establishes between Nelly's impoverished mind and her impoverished world, which I read principally through her unfamiliarity with narrative representation. Harkness sustains two discrete perspectives in A City Girl: Nelly experiences the world in episodic moments, and her inability to shape these moments into a purposeful or predictive sequence makes her effectively powerless to control the events that shape her life. Her distance from a narrative consciousness alerts us to the second perspective in the novel which might otherwise escape special notice: the narrative realism that A City Girl participates in, that the experience of reading the novel activates, and that is self-consciously followed by Arthur Grant, Nelly's seducer. Arthur's class-based narrative advantage over Nelly enables him to write the story of their affair and control its outcome much in the way that the readers of A City Girl have worked to make sense of Nelly's detached and inexpressive character, and have often made their own determinations about the novel's ending. The medium of the novel's hostility to Nelly's particular kind of consciousness is a metaliterary reflection, then, of the subjugation by narrative disadvantage that we see play out in the story.

While there is never any serious doubt that Mr. Arabin, clergyman hero of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857), is destined to marry our heroine, Eleanor Bold, there are moments in the novel when he is all but overcome by the charms of Signora Madeline Neroni, most beautiful and most amoral member of the rackety Stanhope family. Having spent her wicked youth in Italy, where her father has been taking an extended leave of absence from his clerical duties – curtailed only by a peremptory summons from the new Bishop – Madeline is entertaining herself during her enforced stay in Barchester by waging a concerted campaign of seduction, intending “to have parsons at her feet” (86–87; vol. 1, ch. 10). The fact that she never leaves her sofa does nothing to impede her success in this regard: although Madeline is described by the narrator as “a helpless, hopeless cripple” (270; vol. 1, ch. 27), every man she meets is shown to fall under her spell. In fact, when Arabin finds himself “mak[ing] comparisons between her and Eleanor Bold, not always in favour of the latter,” he reflects that Madeline is “the more lovely woman of the two, and had also the additional attraction of her affliction; for to him it was an attraction” (74; vol. 2, ch. 34). Far from diminishing her “loveliness,” Madeline's disability actually heightens her sexual appeal for Arabin.

In Charlotte Brontë’sVillette (1853), Lucy Snowe is tasked to deliver a “little basket” to the mysterious shut-in Madame Walravens (396; ch. 34). After crossing an “inhospitable threshold” (398) that leads to an “inhospitable salon” (400), Lucy is told to wait for the lady of the house, who will serve as both grandmother and wolf in this Red Riding Hood revision. Caught in a dreamlike, “fairy tale” trance, Lucy focuses her attention on a curious picture, which “give[s] way” to expose an arched doorway and a winding staircase. The tapestry momentarily displaced, Lucy hears the taps of a walking-stick, and then spies a “substance” that eventually materializes into the distinct form of Madame Walravens: “She might be three feet high, but she had no shape. . .. Her face was large, set, not upon her shoulders, but before her breast; she seemed to have no neck.” Lucy proceeds to call her host “[h]unchbacked,” and “dwarfish” — a “barbarian queen,” an “uncouth thing,” and an “old witch of a grand-dame” (399–402; ch. 34), who is as “hideous as a Hindoo idol” (473; ch. 39). Most important, Lucy notes the “violence of a temper which deformity made sometimes demoniac” (403; ch. 34). Madame Walravens's physical abnormalities make her not just the villain of a fairy tale, but a supernatural terror. Lucy may only confront the reality of disability by transforming it into a “tale of magic” (399; ch. 34) — one that she escapes by re-crossing the “inhospitable threshold.”

How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity's detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept's abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural history? Such questions have already commissioned a range of critical projects that attempt to reframe the Anthropocene itself: as a trope of science fiction, given how humans are “terraforming” the planet (Heise 215–20); as an object for media archaeology, considering the “signatures” that our aggregate actions are leaving in the physical strata of the earth (Boes and Marshall 64–67); and as a challenge to the categorical distinctions by which historical study is practiced, with its blurring of “human history” and “natural history” (Chakrabarty 201–07).