Of all the devices of our complex and complete civilization, I think this huge circulating library system one of the most convenient and agreeable;…to have…volumes of excellent literature for one's exclusive use, seems to me a real privilege, and capital return for one's money.

—Frances Ann Kemble, Further Records 1848–1883

AT AGE FIFTY-TWO, THOMAS HARDY was beginning to feel uneasy about aging. On October 11, 1892, he wrote to his friend Arthur Blomfield: “Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle…. Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!” (F. Hardy 13–14). This moment of specular disgust was ultimately recorded in a poem: I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, “Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!”For then, I, undistrestBy hearts grown cold to me,Could lonely wait my endless restWith equanimity.But Time, to make me grieve,Part steals, lets part abide;And shakes this fragile frame at eveWith throbbings of noontide. (T. Hardy, Complete Poems 81)

… the arrival of the ale made an agreeable diversion; for Adam had to give his opinion of the new tap, which could not be otherwise than complimentary to Mrs Poyser; and then followed a discussion on the secrets of good brewing, the folly of stinginess in ‘hopping,’ and the doubtful economy of a farmer's making his own malt. Mrs Poyser had so many opportunities of expressing herself with weight on these subjects, that by the time supper was ended, the ale mug refilled, and Mr Poyser's pipe alight, she was once more in high good-humour, and ready, at Adam's request, to fetch the broken spinning-wheel for his inspection.

—George Eliot, Adam Bede

ON 23 DECEMBER 1858, the Times reported the proceedings of the trial in Reading of Mary Newell, a servant, for the willful murder of her three-month-old child, whose body had been discovered in the Thames by boys who had gone fishing. Since Newell herself had admitted the crime in a statement to the constables who came to her mother's house to arrest her, the focus of the trial was not so much on establishing the guilt or innocence of the prisoner as it was on determining what could have motivated such an extreme and seemingly unnatural act of violence in order to decide the severity of her punishment. According to the testimony of a fellow inmate in the workhouse where she lived, Newell had been “a kind and affectionate mother” to the infant and had “suckled it to the last”; the prisoner's defense counsel, seeking to reconcile this description with the seriousness of her crime, invited the medical witness to affirm that she might have been “seized by a destructive impulse” that made her “destroy [that] to which [she] was most fondly attached.” While Newell's defense hoped to establish mental instability as the likeliest conceivable explanation for her act, the prisoner's confession to the constables, describing her hopelessness on being turned away by the child's father, pointed to another motivation, that of economic desperation: “I went to the father of it, and he refused to give me anything, and I told him I would swear the baby, or have a summons for him. He said I might do so. He put on his coat and left me in the shop…. I stood there till his sister put up the shutters. She said it was no use to stop any longer, he would not be home till 11 or 12. I walked the town till 12, being destitute of a farthing. I walked down the Forbury to the King's Meadow. I undressed the baby and laid it by the side on the bank, and let the baby roll in. Afterwards I walked up and down to see if I could see him come indoors. After that I went and got over into a field, and sat under a hedge–it was in a turnip field–till morning…. I saw him at Christmas and he said he would pay for the child.” (“Criminal Courts” 23 Dec. 1858)

IN AUTUMN OF 1854, Mary Jane Grant Seacole traveled to England from Jamaica and “laid…pertinacious siege” to the official and private residences of Sidney Herbert, Secretary-at-War, hoping to secure a post as hospital nurse in the Crimea. Thwarted in her attempts to see the Secretary, Seacole applied to his wife, Elizabeth Herbert, who informed her “that the full complement of nurses had been secured” (Seacole 78, 79). Seacole made one last effort, meeting this time “with one of Miss Nightingale's companions”; this woman, she reports, “gave me the same reply [as Mrs. Herbert], and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it” (79). These interlocutors rejected her, Seacole implies, on account of her colored skin (her mother was Jamaican, her father Scottish), but English prejudice did not keep the “doctress” (as she termed herself) from the front.

AT A CRITICAL JUNCTURE in part one of Harriet Martineau's Berkeley the Banker, the fourteenth novel in her Illustrations of Political Economy series, there is a run on a country bank. The run is precipitated by a casual exchange in a local shop during which Mrs. Millar, the confectioner, is given a five-pound note to change. Her reply “Oh, I cant change that note [sic]” is misunderstood by others in the shop to mean that she is refusing to honor a particular bank's note while, in fact, she is simply not able to make change (169). The panic that ensues ruins Mr. Berkeley, the country bank's proprietor, and serves the novel's aim of demonstrating the precariousness of paper currency unbacked by the gold standard. In describing this incident, as well as through various characters' periodic lectures, the novel argues that only a gold standard could have prevented a calamity such as the bank run. Under a gold standard, citizens of the town of Haleham never could have misinterpreted Mrs. Millar's remarks–they would have known that the note must be honored and that, therefore, the confectioner merely lacked the correct change. Under a gold standard, in other words, the meaning of paper currency is not open to misinterpretation; its value is fully known and stable. Martineau may be convinced of the gold standard's ability to scuttle the dangers of textual ambiguity, but this moment also exposes the challenge of regulating the circulation and proliferation of meaning. The meaning of a speech act and the value of a banknote are both revealed as unstable and difficult, perhaps impossible, to regulate or manage.

IN THE MELODRAMATIC FINAL MOMENTS of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Bumble the ex-beadle is exposed for helping to obliterate Oliver's patrimony. When he attempts to shift the blame for his unlawful actions onto Mrs. Bumble, Mr. Brownlow will not allow such a move because, as Brownlow declares, “‘in the eye of the law’” the husband is the “‘more guilty of the two…for the law supposes that [his] wife acts under [his] direction’” (335; ch. 51). While a model of oppressive officialdom and petty tyranny in his public life, Bumble is no match for the termagant he has married; and the revelation of his private humiliation leads him to reply: “‘If that's the eye of the law, the law's a bachelor’” (335; ch. 51). It is easy to dismiss Bumble's assertion that the “law's a bachelor” as an instance of Dickensian wit, but this essay contends that Oliver Twist is a serious exploration of the “bachelor law.” Specifically, it explores one aspect of the New Poor Laws that did favor Britain's bachelors– the bastardy clause.

In voices, time and accident may occasion great alteration.

—Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy

LOOKING BACK to an earlier moment in its own cultural history, no Victorian novel works harder than Middlemarch at the integration of art and life, in terms of both the issues it addresses and its method of composition. Central to this effort is the art-related sequence (chapters 19–21) in which Will Ladislaw encounters the newly married Casaubons on their honeymoon in Rome. In the Belvedere Gallery of the Vatican with a painter friend, Will discovers Dorothea standing lost in thought near a famous Hellenistic sculpture of a sleeping, bare-breasted woman. Struck by the congruity of poses in two such different figures, Will's friend Naumann is on fire to paint Dorothea, and a few days later, rather in spite of himself, Will brings the Casaubons to Naumann's studio. Here, in one of the most broadly comic scenes in the novel, the painter persuades Casaubon to pose as Thomas Aquinas for a historical portrait, slyly securing his sketch of Dorothea during breaks in the sitting. Throughout the sequence, Will engages in aesthetic discourse first with Naumann, then with Dorothea, introducing her to the hugeness of art and, incidentally, to the smallness of her husband.

In short, this [the exchange of gifts] represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are.

—Marcel Mauss, The Gift

ONE OF THEOED'S DEFINITIONS of the word “freak” is that of a freak of nature, “a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” The freak of nature I wish to focus on in this essay is marriage, and specifically, marriage as it is “exhibited” in Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). To refer to marriage in a Victorian novel as a freak of nature is perhaps surprising. To refer to the sacred institution as freakish in a Dickens novel may seem to border on heresy. After all, Dickens is the self-appointed novelist of hearth and home, the creator of conservative domestic plots that celebrate marriage as the institution that establishes closure for the novel and for the society it represents. Despite this apparent conservatism and despite our vague sense that most marriages in Dickens are as happy as David and Agnes's, Esther and Allen Woodcourt's, Biddy and Joe's, it is in fact the case that in all his novels, from The Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend, Dickens is fascinated–in a multiplicity of ways both large and small, in a manner that is alternately comic, tragic, melodramatic, ironic–with marriage's discontents. In fact, the disintegration of the institution is one of the things that Dickens makes fictions from, giving the failure of marriage a surprisingly high degree of visibility and presenting the breaking of the matrimonial bond with remarkable clarity and persistence. Dickens novels are full of wives who leave their husbands (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind), breach of promise suits (in Pickwick and Our Mutual Friend most famously) and characters who try to find legal ways of escaping their marriages (Stephen Blackpool, Betsey Trotwood, Nickleby's Madame Mantalini). This essay, then, is an analysis of how Dickens undermines the institution early in his career, and of how the comic and grotesque display of the body, the sprawling, teeming physical surfaces of The Old Curiosity Shop, both conceal and reveal a story of marital skepticism.

A STRIKING NUMBER OF CHARACTERS in Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories who return to England after a sojourn in the colonies have an outlandish aspect. One, a contorted and bilious ex-soldier, owns a pet Indian mongoose. Another has lost a leg to a crocodile in the Ganges and has a poison-toting Andaman Islander in tow. A third keeps a fiendish hound and passes his South American wife off as his sister. A fourth returns from South Africa with a “blanched” face and a furtive manner. Many of these returned colonials are portrayed as menacing, and their presence in England precipitates a crisis, either a crime or a mysterious tragedy. In actual fact, return from the colonies to the metropole was a routine phenomenon, and returned colonials were familiar figures on the metropolitan landscape. Why does Doyle depict the phenomenon of return from Empire as so problematic if it was in fact quite commonplace?

THE IDEA OF THE SELF in its various constructions–political, economic, psychological–has always been shadowed by an English tradition of skepticism about the persistence of a conscious and stable identity. Voiced most disconcertingly by David Hume in his section, “Of personal identity” from A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40; I.iv.vi), this attitude was significantly advanced during the second half of the nineteenth century by a group of physiological psychologists who argued for the corporeal basis of mental functions, including memory. Henry Maudsley and George Henry Lewes, among others, challenged the metaphysical notion of a mind and drew instead from controversial and often suppressed theories of neuroscience to describe the physiological operation of memory. These theories, which located impressions and sensations in the brain or spinal chord, produced a form of identity that could endure alterations of consciousness. They offered, in addition, a new understanding of an adult's physical connection to the personal past.

[Harris and a female follower] told me about the fays while I was up at Fountain Grove; how at first a little “Two-in-one” would move into a person's breast as soon as they could find entrance, and then clearing a space would begin to build their house; soon they would have a garden and plant fruit-trees; and then little baby fays would be born. The fays have many babies, and so they keep and keep on enlarging the spaces and filling them full of beautiful houses, gardens, and groves, till at last the whole being, to the very extremities of fingers and toes, is all a fairy universe, a world of loveliness. Just think of having lovely little fays bathing in the veins.

—A Sister in the New Life, Santa Rosa, California, June 9, 1881

“HOW MANY TRAVELLERS from all lands have visited this dwelling among the Westmoreland mountains as a shrine!” (377). So begins Maria Weston Chapman's 1877 homage to The Knoll, Harriet Martineau's Ambleside home. By the 1870s The Knoll had become a regular stop on literary tours of the Lake District. This was of course partly due to the fact that Martineau's literary reputation had established her as a central figure in most major political and social controversies of her day, including industrial relations, women's rights, and abolition. By the time she came to settle in the Lake District, Martineau had already published over a dozen successful works, including Illustrations of Political Economy, Society in America, and Deerbrook. She had also published numerous articles in literary periodicals such as the Westminster Review, Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, and the Monthly Repository.

STANLEY FISH RECENTLY IDENTIFIED the intersection between crime and religion as a hot topic, a trend that he gauged by paying attention to a popular television show: “Law and Order…from its beginning…has had its plots follow the headlines. Only if the tension between commitment to the rule of law and commitment to one's ethnic or religious affiliation was, so to speak, in the news would a television writer put it at the heart of a story.” During the same week that Fish published this claim, a Texas woman who drowned her five children had her guilty verdict overturned when it was revealed that an expert witness for the prosecution had made false statements to the court about an episode of the very same show. Commentators on the case said the witness had confused plots from Law and Order with real-life trials. One need not be Oscar Wilde to see a meta-dramatic chiasmus at work here: Law and Order imitates life, but life also imitates Law and Order. The same could be said of popular Victorian crime fiction, which was serialized in eagerly awaited autonomous episodes in a manner not unlike televised crime drama. Victorian authors, moreover, commonly sought inspiration in real-life criminal plots. Like Law and Order, such fictional representations both mirrored and created readers' “reality” outside the text. In this article, I will examine a previously unexplored instance of such fictional recycling and reinvention: L. T. Meade's popular detective series The Sorceress of the Strand, I argue, is an overt rewriting of the strange case of “Madame Rachel,” a notorious female criminal of the 1860s. Before I make my case concerning how, why, and to what end Meade revised Madame Rachel's story, let me briefly summarize the evidence for this connection.

For this issue, Victorians Live takes a global perspective on the afterlife of the Victorians. Using a fine nineteenth-century phrase, Margaret Harris writes of “Victorian Vestiges” in Australia. Carole Silver describes the mix of concealment and display in South Africa's dealing with its Victorian heritage. My essay on a recent American exhibition of the work of Morris & Co. shows the influence of this representative Victorian in California, as filtered through the collection of Henry Huntington for his Library in southern California and with additions for this show by contemporary California collectors. That Morris continues to live into our time is vividly shown in the venues of his global exhibitions, in Australia in a converted nineteenth-century powerhouse, at Yale in the modernist masterpiece of the twentieth-century architect, Louis Kahn.

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA–eclectic, vibrant, and heterogeneous–still bears the marks of its past as a site of Victoria's empire. The city abounds in English Victorian artifacts: buildings, statues, fountains, streets and their names (even to Victoria Street and Rhodes Drive) are all reminders of the period, but one wonders what, if anything, they mean to the people who live with them. Some recognize them as a legacy–pleasant or unpleasant– of the days when the Cape was a British colony; to others they are symbols whose context has been forgotten, to yet others, they are simply objects devoid of extrinsic meaning. All are, however, artifacts of imperialism, in its broader sense of the social, political, economic, and cultural domination of one group over all others.

ON 1 JANUARY 1901, at the beginning of a new century, the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed a political entity by the federation of six separate British colonies. Queen Victoria's formal assent to the necessary legislation of the Westminster Parliament was one of her last official acts; she died on 22 January. For all the tyranny of 20,000 kilometres distance, the impress of the monarch on her far-flung colony was evident. Two of the states of the Commonwealth, Victoria and Queensland, had been named for her. When the Port Phillip settlement separated from New South Wales in 1851, it became Victoria; in 1859, when the Moreton Bay settlement also hived off, its first governor announced “a fact which I know you will all hear with delight–Queensland, the name selected for this new Colony, was entirely the happy thought and inspiration of Her Majesty herself!” (Cilento and Lack 161)

“THE BEAUTY OF LIFE” : William Morris & the Art of Design was a visual delight. Curated by Dianne Waggoner, the exhibition originated at the Huntington Library and was first shown at the Yale Center for British Art, enriched by additions from the Yale Center for British Art, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Yale University Library. For those who missed this Victorianists' treat at New Haven and San Marino, the fine catalog edited by Waggoner provides illustrations and detailed accounts of the items as well as perceptive critical essays.