On the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria was depicted in a woodcut by William Nicholson that was to become extremely popular (Figure 1). So stout that her proportions approach those of a cube, the Queen is dressed from top to toe in her usual black mourning attire, the white of her gloved hands punctuating the otherwise nearly solid black rectangle of her body. Less than thirty years later, another simple image of a woman in black would prove to be equally iconic: the lithe, narrow column of Chanel's black dress (Figure 2). Comparing the dresses depicted in the two images – the first a visual reminder of the desexualized stolidity of Victorian fidelity, the second image an example of women's burgeoning social and sexual liberation – might lead one to conclude that the only thing they have in common is the color black. And yet, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion historians suggest that Victorian mourning is the direct antecedent of the sexier fashions that followed. Jill Fields writes, for example, that “the move to vamp black became possible because the growing presence of black outerwear for women in the nineteenth century due to extensive mourning rituals merged with the growing sensibility that dressing in black was fashionable” (144). Valerie Mendes is more direct: “Traditional mourning attire blazed a trail for the march of fashionable black and the little black dress” (9). These are provocative claims given that most scholarly accounts of Victorian mourning attire – whether from the perspective of literary analysis, fashion history or theory, or social history or theory – offer no indication that such progressive possibilities were inherent in widows’ weeds. Instead, those accounts focus almost exclusively on chasteness and piety, qualities required of the sorrowful widow, as the only message communicated by her attire: “Widows’ mourning clothes announced the ongoing bonds of fidelity, dependence, and grieving that were expected to tie women to their dead husbands for at least a year” (Bradbury 289). The disparity in the two accounts raises the question: how could staid, cumbersome black Victorian mourning attire lead to dresses understood to embrace sexuality and mobility?

While literary critics have become increasingly engaged by the impact of suburbanization on the literary landscape, most scholarship has focused on texts from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The belief that suburbia appeared only occasionally in literature before this period is commonplace: as Gail Cunningham observes: “Although the term ‘suburb’ was used from Shakespeare and Milton onwards . . . it was not until the final decades of the nineteenth century that writers turned to suburban life as a subject of imaginative investigation” (Cunningham, “Riddle” 51). Cunningham's important work on suburban narrative positions authors of the late nineteenth century as architects of “the new imaginative category suburban,” one that was substantially shaped by the experience of observing and living amongst “newly massed middle classes” (Cunningham, “Riddle” 52). “[F]or many writers . . . the prime response to the new suburbia was one of anxiety and disorientation,” she argues. “How were they to conceptualize the sudden appearance of the new spatial environment?” (Cunningham, “Houses” 423). Yet Cunningham's emphasis on the newness of both the category and the lived experience underestimates the impact of suburbanization on the totality of the period. Suburbanization was a phenomenon that Victorian society had been experiencing, and responding to, for at least eight decades by the time of Victoria's death. Literary narratives engaging suburbia from these eight decades undoubtedly exist: they have received scant critical attention, yet they constitute a crucial tradition without which the most famous late-nineteenth-century texts of suburbia cannot be adequately understood.

In the years following the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë's social circle expanded rapidly, extending far beyond the narrow circumference of Haworth Parsonage. The later letters attest to personal acquaintance with many prominent literary contemporaries, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes, and William Thackeray. Yet, second perhaps only to Thackeray, the writer that Brontë credits as most influential to her thinking about art and narrative is one that she never did meet: John Ruskin. Brontë's initial exposure to Ruskin's work came through the channel of their shared publisher, George Smith, who in 1848 sent her a copy of the first two volumes of Modern Painters.

On 19 May 1868 the Conservative MP Percy Wyndham rose in the House of Commons to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department “whether he is aware that Publications, the sale of which has been condemned by a Court of Law, are now being openly offered for sale in the Streets of London, and such being the case, whether the Police have power to interfere?” Gathorne Hardy replied that

There is a curious narrative moment near the middle of George Eliot's novel Silas Marner. Marner, on discovering the theft of his gold, runs to the Rainbow Inn, the village's popular gathering place, intending to broadcast the theft and demand justice. This is a climatic moment in the plot; as readers we turn the page with mounting anticipation: how will the villagers react to the strange weaver's first intrusion into this most sacred of spaces in Raveloe? The reader must immediately be disappointed, then, on turning the page and coming to chapter six. We do go inside the Rainbow Inn but leave Marner on the other side of the yet-unopened door; instead of an exciting confrontation between Marner and the villagers, we are made to listen to a meandering exchange of retold stories by a cast of unimportant characters. This narrative interruption within the novel echoes the much larger interruptions that surround the production and reception of this text. Silas Marner most literally interrupted Eliot's work on Romola. She says in her journal that the idea “thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating” (Journals 87). The novel also disrupts most critical consensus about Eliot as a realist writer. No one seems quite sure what to do with this half fable, half realist work alongside such masterpieces as Middlemarch. In addition, the character of Marner interrupts what we have come to expect from Eliot's characters; whether an earlier hero like Adam Bede or a later heroine like Gwendolen Harleth, her characters have at least some endearing qualities despite, or maybe because of, their flaws. When one turns to Silas Marner, however, a reader can be hard pressed to find anything appealing about the peculiar weaver.

Impelled to seek relief from a “peccant chest” (L233) at the seaside, Christina Rossetti travelled to Hastings in December 1864, taking a carefully wrapped bundle of unfinished manuscript poetry with her. Throughout the winter until the following March, a series of letters to Cheyne Walk kept her brother Dante Gabriel abreast not only of her gradual recovery, but also of her efforts to complete her second book of poetry, two years after she had made a successful debut with Goblin Market. Shortly after her arrival, Rossetti reported that she was struggling to finish “The Prince's Progress,” the long narrative poem that was to lend its title to the new volume:

After Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the New Statesman in 1913, one of their inaugural projects was a series of short articles entitled “What is Socialism?,” which ran from April through September of that year. A telling example of their attempts to frame the debate occurs in installment twelve, in which they liken choosing equality as a social ideal with “teach[ing] ourselves to be gentlemen” and instituting a new “national standard of good manners” (364). They struck a similar note in The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (1923), condemning capitalist competition as inherently vulgar (36) and tracing “the democratic conception of good manners” to those “strata of society where a practical equality of material circumstances happens to prevail, and social position depends” upon circumstances other than wealth (40). This seemingly anomalous mix of socialism and the behavioral conventions of gentility signals a broader rhetorical strategy employed by the Webbs and other Fabian spokesmen to promote their political brand from the 1880s on.

Thomas Hardy noted regretfully: “Few literary critics discern the solidarity of all the arts” (Florence Hardy 300). An architect self-educated in art history by visits to London museums, an avid reader of John Ruskin, keenly alive to music and responsive to the ornamental sculpture and painting of Gothic buildings, Hardy believed in a composite muse. After ceasing to write novels, in which he had included numerous painterly allusions and references to specific art works, he overtly probed the image/text relation in his 1898 debut volume of poetry: Wessex Poems and Other Verses, by Thomas Hardy, with 30 Illustrations by the Author. Although a reading experience dependent upon the original aesthetic interplay that Hardy had designed was destroyed in most subsequent printings, the first edition's partnership of image and text remains absolutely central to the book's multiple meanings. Indeed, Hardy's images and words should be regarded as inseparable, since they interact in what W. J. T. Mitchell has called a “composite art form” (83, 89).