Filled with caustic statements on artificial plant breeding and florist flowers, John Ruskin's botanical essay collection, Proserpina (1875–86), advances a cogent argument against commercial floriculture and, by extension, the commodification of vegetal life. However, the eco-political stakes of this text have received limited attention. Past studies have primarily interpreted Proserpina as a testament to Ruskin's disquiet about Darwinism and as a memorial to his late love, Rose La Touche. In this article, I argue that beneath these scientific and personal imperatives, Proserpina urges readers to resist the consumption of floral commodities engineered by Victorian nurserymen and florists. My reading draws together the history of nineteenth-century flower breeding with recent inquiries from the field of critical plant studies in order to illuminate how Ruskin's botanical prose dovetails with present-day debates on vegetal ethics. Flower-breeding motifs figure prominently in a series of letters written for Proserpina by Rose's mother, Maria La Touche, whose contributions to this book have long been overlooked. Analyzing Proserpina's floricultural subtext will not only recover La Touche's letters from the shadow of Ruskin's love life but also underscore an unexplored facet of Ruskin's antipathy toward Darwin, who celebrated florist flowers in his own botanical writings.

“Affective Transmission and the Invention of Characters in the Victorian Bildungsroman” reconsiders several novels about young women as they make their way into a larger social world. Rather than achieving self-discipline, as has frequently been argued, heroines such as Lucy Snowe, Maggie Tulliver, and Margaret Hale tend to be overpowered by interpersonal emotions. They distance themselves from these affects by attributing them to fictitious characters. The gendered variation of the larger tradition this article sketches out calls into question the premise of the bildungsroman as a whole, raising the possibility that the adjustment of the self to external realities is never as complete as it seems.

This essay explores how Charles Dickens's representation of history in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his historical novel of the French Revolution, is influenced by the Phantasmagoria. The Phantasmagoria was an optical ghost show popularized in Paris in the 1790s by the showman Etienne Gaspard Robertson. Using a hidden magic lantern in a pitch-dark room, Robertson projected images of ghosts and skeletons as well as historical personages from the French Revolution. Drawing on Dickens's own writings on the Phantasmagoria, the essay argues that Dickens's approach to historical fiction is informed by the Phantasmagoria's medium-specific effects and its cultural association with history and historical memory. Specifically, Dickens's turn to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity to represent historical temporality is influenced by the dialectical visual effects of the Phantasmagoria and related mid-nineteenth-century optical technologies. A Tale of Two Cities has always resisted the dialectical-materialist paradigm for the nineteenth-century historical novel first developed by Georg Lukács and more recently elaborated by Fredric Jameson. By employing a media archaeological framework, this essay offers a revitalized approach to Dickens's historical representation that contextualizes it within nineteenth-century theories and discourses of optical perception.

E. W. Hornung's novel The Camera Fiend (1911) imagines a frighteningly extreme vision of photography. This text leverages an existing discourse about the camera fiend—an amateur photographer who intrudes on strangers to capture snapshots of vulnerable moments. I argue that an examination of Hornung's version of the camera fiend, including its conflation with the representation of the scientist, illuminates the logic of threatening liminality and monstrous synthesis in the relationship between photography and existing social conventions. The text also proposes a solution to these cultural fears by repairing social disruptions, but it does so at a cost that is untenable.

Alfred Tennyson's poem “The Palace of Art” (1832/1842) is liable to strike the modern reader as all too clear in its meanings. Yet the author evidently feels the need to gloss the theme of the work and to elaborately preview its narrative in a brief poem that he includes with the piece when he sends it to his friend Richard Trench. “I send you here a sort of allegory (For you will understand it),” Tennyson writes in a peculiar formulation that muddies several issues about the aspirations of the work even while expressing certainty about the poem's clarity. The suggestion is that Trench will have access to a particular insight (“you will understand” being something we say when others may not). Or does Tennyson mean that the allegory is so clear that its tendency is unmissable? That would certainly be a reasonable construal of the claim about a poem with few apparent mysteries.

Adena Rosmarin's comment is part of a wider discussion of E. H. Gombrich's idea of the role of “schema” in perceptions of art—a concept he uses to explain, among other things, how it is that observers can perceive a face in a collection of lines and dots, and, more generally, why it makes sense to say that all art begins not with nothing but with something. A snowman starts with the schema that is snow, for example, and we “work the snow and balance the shapes till we recognize a man.” And not only do we work the snow to achieve some approximation of human faces and bodies, but we find human characteristics in—or, more accurately, make characters out of—all sorts of things, living and not. Certainly, we project character onto living nonhumans, such as cats, dogs, birds, and plants, imagining that they share our feelings of love, loneliness, and desire, but we also assign character and characteristics to inanimate objects and assorted phenomena: ships, cars, and hurricanes all get names; we may talk to the toaster, or grumble at a shoelace that, we imagine, stubbornly refuses—refuses!—to untie. Thus it is hardly surprising that literary characters, intended expressly as vehicles for imaginative occupation, take on a similarly outsize quality in our psyches. Words on a page, constructions of language, they invite us to consider them as soulmates and doppelgängers; nightmare—or perhaps ideal—versions of parents, brothers, sisters, friends, and selves: the families we might have chosen if we could; the me (or not me) nobody knows.