Prompted by the gaps in archival evidence for writing histories of minoritized lives, scholars, archivists, and artists have increasingly adopted speculative archival methods. Shaped by queer temporalities, Black feminist epistemologies, and decolonial approaches, speculative approaches use techniques from narrative fiction to envision and reconstruct the past while acknowledging the limitations of documentary evidence. This essay seeks to expand the potential of fictional character for writing minoritized historical subjects by reexamining the institutionalization of archives in the nineteenth century and their effect on what counts as archival proof. To do so, it looks to the archivist's queer other, the Victorian miser. First, the essay reads Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865) to show how the miser's hoarding challenges the desire to cash out an archival find while frustrating the researcher's desire for completeness and depth. Next, it moves on to George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) to demonstrate the affordances of minor character for speculative knowledge, which has previously relied on the protagonist model for representing absent historical subjects. Through the figure of the miser, this essay embraces opacity and superficial intimacies as valuable approaches to depicting minoritzed figures of the past.

Despite their overlapping fin de siècle New Woman communities in London and their correspondence, few scholars have compared the literary works of South African writer Olive Schreiner and Jewish author Amy Levy directly. Reading allegories from Schreiner's first collection, Dreams (1890), in relation to two of Levy's early verse works, “Xantippe” (1881) and Medea (1884), I argue that they both imagine new futures for queer community as an alternative to the oppressive status quo of imperialist England. This paper suggests that Schreiner and Levy, feminist writers with fraught relationships to Englishness, can best be understood as members of a rich community of late Victorian visionaries. When they turn their attention to the forms of allegory and dramatic monologue, Schreiner and Levy are able to explore radical possibilities for gender and community that did not exist in their real lives or their realist fiction. Schreiner and Levy share a deep skepticism about the benefits of marriage, family, and other conventional sources of community, and both offer queer visions of suspended present states or undetermined futures as alternatives.

Verney Lovett Cameron (1844–1894) has now lapsed into relative obscurity, but in the late nineteenth century he was among the premiere British explorers, having established his credentials by completing a transcontinental African expedition (1872–76) from present-day Tanzania to Angola. This article, however, focuses on Cameron's status as the most prolific of a range of explorers who turned to the affordances of prose fiction. Imaginative literature provided supplements or alternatives to the expeditionary narrative that operated outside the parameters of institutional science and were not regulated by the same protocols. Drawing on Gérard Genette's narrative taxonomy of the “sequel” and the “serious transposition,” I argue that Cameron's fiction extended his preoccupations with “commercial geography” and private enterprise while also opening the way to surprising alternative conceptualizations of geographical travel. The Adventures of Herbert Massey (1887) uses fictional adventure to invite capitalist venture and specifically to advertise East Africa as amenable to administration by chartered company. The highly esoteric plot of The Queen's Land (1886), by contrast, offers a geographical allegory that at once celebrates the explorer's expertise and casts expeditions as the source of secret knowledge.

Focusing on famine novels by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope and drawing upon Sianne Ngai's account of aesthetic categories, this article questions how the “interesting,” as an aesthetic category, accommodates cultural difference and distance, on one hand, and demonstrates how material interests shape and delimit the expansion of the public sphere, on the other. It argues that Irish novels present Ireland as aesthetically interesting insofar as it differs from England—suggesting strangeness, peculiarity, unpredictability. Yet including Ireland in a vision of a shared public tends to require the opposite—the assimilation of Irish people into British interests—rendering Ireland conventional and familiar. In other words, the strangeness or novelty that makes Ireland aesthetically interesting is the very thing that prevents Irish people from being incorporated into the liberal idea of a public or a vision of British public interest.

Margaret Marshall Saunders's best-selling novel Beautiful Joe (1893) has long been indexed as anthropomorphic children's literature. This article examines the novel to illuminate the connection between nineteenth-century literature and animal-focused research, including studies of the science of the mind. My analysis seeks to coalesce what I see as neighboring discourses, both historical and contemporary, in literature and science about what it means to be a thinking, feeling “self.” In doing so, I reveal how Saunders's novel maps out the stakes of this impasse as consequential to literary criticism and the wider culture through its subject matter's entanglement with questions of consciousness, anthropomorphism, and representation.