IN 1883, the American physician J. B. Mattison made the startling announcement that the majority of American morphine habitues were doctors and suggested that between thirty and forty percent of medical professionals were addicted (23). By 1909, an English addiction specialist had broadened the context and seemingly raised the ante, claiming “that the proportion of medical addicts to the total of cases is in some statistics as high as ninety per cent., and that one-fifth of the mortality in the profession is said to be caused by morphinism” (Jennings, The Morphia Habit v). Looking back in 1924, the German psychopharmacologist Louis Lewin referred to a “statistical table of [morphine] addicts, including all countries of the world,” which “gave 40.4 per cent doctors, 10.0 per cent doctors' wives” (54). Of course, all these data are somewhat questionable since reliable measures would have been all but impossible to obtain and the proportions surely varied over the periods and areas in question. But we can reasonably deduce at least this much: medical professionals were consistently the most prominent demographic group among morphine addicts in the developed western world after the middle of the nineteenth century.

THE LAST THREE DECADES of the nineteenth century were phobia's belle époque. During this first phase of investigation there was, it must have seemed, no species of terror, however febrile, which could not talk its way immediately into syndrome status. In 1896, in his Psychology of the Emotions, Théodule Ribot spoke of psychiatry's inundation by a “veritable deluge” of complaints ranging from the relatively commonplace and self-explanatory, such as claustrophobia, to the downright idiosyncratic, such as triakaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13 (213). Twenty years later, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was to respond with similar impatience to the list of phobias drawn up by the American psychologist Stanley Hall. Hall had managed to find 132 (446).

Gothic stories and fictionalized travel accounts featuring dangerous exotic plants appeared throughout the nineteenth century and were especially prevalent at the fin de siècle. As the century progressed and the public's fascination with these narratives grew, fictional plants underwent a narrative evolution. By the end of the Victorian period, deadly plants had been transformed from passive poisoners into active carnivores. Stories about man-eating trees, among the most popular of the deadly plant tales, reflect this narrative progression. The trope of the man-eating tree developed out of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts of a much less dangerous plant: the Javanese upas. Tales about the upas described the tree as having a poisonous atmosphere which killed every living thing within a several mile radius. The existence of this plant was first reported by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch in a 1783 article published in the London Magazine, and the story was recounted several times throughout the century (“The Valley of Poison” 46). A typical account of the popular tale would highlight the exotic location and the mysterious power of the tree:

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.

DESPITE THE WELL-ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONS between Dickens's novels and Victorian popular entertainment, and between Victorian show business and the display and dissemination of science, critics have not yet explored the possible links between scientific shows and Dickens's fiction. Work on Dickens and science has proliferated since George Levine's work in Darwin and the Novelists, but its central problem has been the fact that, as Francis O’Gorman described it, Dickens's scientific reading was “nugatory” (252). The most well-represented branch of science on his bookshelves was natural history; in even this, Dickens displayed only the “intelligent interest that would be expected of a man of the world” (Hill 203). Levine's influential “one culture” model surmounted the problem by pointing out the similar structural patterns implicit in the worlds described by Dickens and Darwin, but in an attempt to develop more direct links between Dickens's work and evolutionary science, almost all subsequent studies have focused on Dickens's 1860s novels, written after the publication of the Origin of Species (1859) (Morris 179–93; Fulweiler 50–74; Morgentaler 707–21). There has not been a study that explores Dickens's acquaintance with natural history at different points in his career, or through the visual and material cultures with which he was so familiar.

THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU (1896) is a richly confused novel, and its complexities and mixed agendas constitute one reason why this remarkable enactment of ideas and theories has received so much, and such varied, critical attention. Its generic, psychological, and thematic disorder does not stand out as much as it might, however, because confusion itself — biological, ethical, epistemological — is one of its subjects.1 Furthermore, the text begins with great and misleading attention to accuracy, precision, and narrative control. First, Charles Edward Prendick introduces the manuscript of his now deceased uncle, Edward Prendick, starting with these details: “On February the First, 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W” (3; Intro.). When Edward Prendick commences the story proper, he begins with similar exactitude, stating what “every one knows” — that “the Lady Vain . . . collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao. The long-boat, with seven of the crew, was picked up eighteen days after by H. M. gunboat Myrtle” (4; ch. 1). He then shifts to private knowledge: although four men in the ship’s dinghy were thought to have perished, there were actually only three men in the boat, with he himself as the sole survivor of that group.

The first time a casually racist reference crops up in the Victorian texts I teach, I tell my students that the presence of slurs and stereotypes in Victorian literature reflects the prevalence of racism in Victorian society. I give them some historical context for the racism whenever possible and smile stoically. Yes, I say, that expression in the novel I've made you purchase and that I'm encouraging you to find fascinating is indeed racist. Let's talk about how racist it is and why! The second time an explicitly racist reference crops up, we refer to the previous conversation. The third time it does, we look meaningfully at each other and shake our heads. The fourth time it does, we don't even mention it. We learn, like the Victorians, to take it for granted.

IN 1839, G. A. WALKER, a London surgeon, published Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly Those in London. Three years later Parliament appointed a House of Commons select committee to investigate “the evils arising from the interment of bodies” in large towns and to consider legislation to resolve the problem.1 Walker’s study opens with a comprehensive history of the modes of interment among all nations, showing the wisdom of ancient practices that removed the dead from the confines of the living. The second portion of the book describes the pathological state of forty-three metropolitan graveyards in an effort to convince the public of the need for legislative interference by the government to prohibit burials in the vicinity of the living.2 Walker’s important work attracted the attention of Parliament and social reformers because of his comprehensive representation of the problem of graveyards, especially among the poor districts of London; his rudimentary statistics that, in effect, isolated them from the rest of the society; and his unbending insistence that national legislators solve the problem. These three impulses influenced the way Edwin Chadwick, secretary to the New Poor Law Commission from 1834 to 1842 and commissioner for the Board of Health from 1848 to 1852, identified and represented the problem of corpses and graveyards in his A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843).

IN CONSIDERING THE SUBJECT of masculinity in Mary Barton (1848), it is perhaps well to remember that Elizabeth Gaskell conceived the novel as being about a man. “‘John Barton’ was the original title of the book,” she wrote to Mrs. W. R. Greg early in 1849. “Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went . . .” (Letters 42: 74). Gaskell’s letter of 5 January 1849 to Miss Lamont reaffirms this: “‘John Barton’ was the original name, as being the central figure to my mind . . . in writing he was [?] my ‘hero’; and it was a London thought coming through the publisher that it must be called Mary B” (Letters 39: 70). While the “London” title of Mary Barton focuses on the romance elements of the plot (and, by extension, on the female gender role), Gaskell’s original title of John Barton focused on working-class protest (and, by extension, on the male gender role). Indeed, there is much to suggest that the novel is as much concerned with masculinity as it is with industrialization and class strife.

THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY both the English popular and scientific communities increasingly argued for a distinct racial difference between the Irish Celt and the English Saxon, which conceptually undermined the Victorian attempt to form a single kingdom from the two peoples. The ethnological discourse concerning Irish identity was dominated by English theorists who reflect their empire’s ideological necessity; thus, the Celt and Saxon were often described as racial siblings early in the nineteenth century when union seemed possible, while later descriptions of the Irish as members of a distant or degenerate race reflect the erosion of public sympathy caused by the era of violence following the failed revolt of 1848. Amid this deluge of scientific discourse, the Irish were treated as mute objects of analysis, lacking any opportunity for formal rejoinder; nonetheless, these essentially English discussions of racial identity and Irishness also entered into the Irish popular culture.

How to map women's poetry at the end of the nineteenth century was a question already posed by Vita Sackville-West in 1929, in her essay, “The Women Poets of the 'Seventies.” She speculated that the 1870s “perhaps might prove the genesis of the literary woman's emancipation,” as a time of transition when “women with a taste for literature” could follow the lead of Victorian poetesses like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while also leading women's poetry forward into the future (111). According to Sackville-West, “Mrs. Browning” seemed an exemplary woman of letters to this generation, because “she had been taught Greek; her father had been a man of culture; and she had married a poet” (112). With the formation of women's colleges and the entry of women into higher education, however, another generation of literary women was emerging. What distinguished these new women of letters was a desire for classical education independent of fathers and husbands, demonstrating an independence of mind anxiously parodied by Punch magazine: The woman of the future! she'll be deeply read, that's certain,With all the education gained at Newnham or at Girton;Or if she turns to classic tomes, a literary roamer,She'll give you bits of Horace or sonorous lines from Homer.Oh pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerningTo overload a woman's brains and cram our girls with learning,You'll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing,To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing. As quoted by Sackville-West in her essay (114), this parody is an equivocal tribute to the generation of women just before her own. Although (in her estimation) the women poets of the seventies produced “nothing of any remarkable value,” nevertheless she admired their intellectual ambition: “a general sense of women scribbling, scribbling” was the “most encouraging sign of all” that the woman of the future was about to come into being, as an idea to be fulfilled by the New Woman of the fin de siècle (131).

THIS PAPER AIMS TO CONTRIBUTE to the resurgent study of relations between literature and the visual arts in nineteenth-century England by exploring a variety of representations of the highly visible poet and law reformer, Caroline Norton.1 One aspect of these intersecting discourses is the image of the author and the processes and effects of its representation. Linda M. Shires in “The Author as Spectacle and Commodity” argues for the inseparable but potentially troubling relation between literary authority and authorial spectacle in Victorian England. Some authors embraced theatrical self-display, others presented a more reserved image to their public. Whereas, Shires suggests, “the need to shape the self through display” (202) was increasingly accepted as a strategy for literary success, the countervailing social pressures on women writers to shun the immodest exposure of publication have been demonstrated by Dorothy Mermin in Godiva’s Ride. Perhaps no writer illustrates the tension created by these opposed imperatives more graphically than Caroline Norton.

REVIEWINGTHE SCHOLARSHIP on Wilde in the last decade is a daunting task not only because of the large amount of recent work on Wilde, but because the ground is already occupied by two book-length surveys: Ian Small’s Oscar Wilde: Recent Research (which picks up where his 1993 Oscar Wilde Revalued left off) and Melissa Knox’s Oscar Wilde in the 1990s: The Critic as Creator. The reader, then, is referred to these volumes for their more comprehensive coverage. Here I will focus my discussion by borrowing what Small designates three “new paradigms” that emerged in the 1990s: the Gay Wilde, the Irish Wilde, Wilde and Consumerism — this last I will rename the Materialist Wilde. To these I will add a fourth category, again taking my cue from Small: Idealist Wilde. In each category I will use representative examples to reflect on the issues confronting these approaches to Wilde. Both Small and Knox evaluate as well as chronicle, though from different perspectives. Small believes work in the field should be better supported by empirical information — “facts” — about Wilde’s life, his career, and the period, and he thinks scholars need to consider whether the different “Wildes” they construct are compatible with each other (12–13). Knox favors a biographical approach to Wilde, saying explicitly that her survey “explores the forms of resistance to biography as well as its successful use in criticism of the l990s” (xv), and turning up more instances of resistance than success.1

In what is surely his best-known “shocker” of the 1890s, Arthur Machen has one of his ubiquitous bachelor heroes (Clarke by name) try to warn another off his pursuit of the truth about a preternaturally dangerous femme fatale figure, a woman responsible for the hideous deaths of a number of English gentlemen. “I am,” he writes to his friend, “like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror. What I know is strange enough and horrible enough, but beyond my knowledge there are depths and horrors more frightful still” (“Pan” 89). But to what “depths,” exactly, does the fearful Clarke refer? What “horrors”? And why, here as elsewhere in this text, do depth and horror seem so intimately interconnected? The tale in question, “The Great God Pan” (1890), bristles with multifarious horrors, to be sure. In the novella's opening episode, a mad scientist figure performs experimental brain surgery on a young woman (“a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all,” he says to an over-scrupulous chum), causing her to “see the god Pan,” and reducing her to idiocy and death (“Pan” 62, 68). The bulk of the subsequent narrative concerns a sequence of seemingly unrelated tragedies – the mysterious death of one gentleman in London, a rash of particularly horrid suicides by a number of others, the demise of an English artist in Buenos Aires – which prove all to be connected to a single figure of monstrous evil, a woman who goes by the name of Helen Vaughn (among others). She is, it turns out, the offspring of the subject of the surgical experiment and Pan himself, and her own (forced) suicide at the end of the story leads to a gruesome tableau of bodily dissolution reminiscent of Poe's M. Valdemar (or, to update the reference, the gooey, B-movie slime Slavoj Žižek seems to have claimed in the name of the Lacanian Real).

In a 1990 review of Jenny Bourne Taylor's In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988), Lawrence Rothfield commented that the book explores what “until recently might have seemed a bizarrely specialized cultural context and an equally obscure literary phenomenon” (97). Rothfield argued that Taylor's study was representative of the recent move to new historicist methodologies, which made contexts and authors once considered to be historical footnotes important to scholarship. Prior to that shift, “[n]ineteenth-century English psychology, a mishmash of scientifically dubious theories and practices such as phrenology, physiognomy, moral management, and mesmerism, hardly seemed key to understanding the broad cultural issues of concern as traditionally construed in Victorian studies” (97). Strikingly, now some twenty-five years later, knowledge of nineteenth-century psychology seems essential to the field. Presses, alert to that shift, have republished out-of-print literary studies that explored Victorian literature in relation to psychology in the years preceding the current surge of interest in the subject. (Faas's 1989 Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry was reissued by Princeton University Press in a 2016 hardcover edition. Kearns's 1987 Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology was reissued in 2014 by the University of Kentucky Press.) Judging by the number of publications in the area, as well as by titles on the programs of recent conferences, the sciences of the mind have become one of the central topics in Victorian studies.

VICTORIANS WERE IN LOVE WITH natural history. David Allen describes their passion as a series of crazes – over geology, over shells, and over ferns, as in pteridomania (mania over ferns) – to cite just a very few examples. Lynn Merrill, on the other hand, delineates a more comprehensive, cultural romance, one extending over many years. Whatever we choose to call this love, we are still in the process of discovering just how deep and lasting it was. Like many love affairs, it was marked at first by a blush enthusiasm and fascination with otherness. This was followed by curiosity and a rage to risk self in the quest to know more about the other – and sometimes, as a result, by ridiculous missteps. Think of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes sloshing around at the seashore, ill-equipped but determined to find out enough to write about what they were trying to capture and study. Or recall Mary Kingsley out in Africa in a canoe propelled by several Congolese, tumbling out of the boat but saving her trusted copy of Albert Günther's 1880 Introduction to the Study of Fishes, tenacious in her desire to bring back labeled specimens to the British Museum of Natural history. Earlier, in a similarly resolute quest to record birdlife, John and Elizabeth Gould globe-trotted to the extent that they put Elizabeth's life and their growing family at risk. And people like explorer/naturalist Thomas Bowdich died of fever for their fervor over natural history, in Bowdich's case as he worked to detail facts about specimens in Porto Santo, off the coast of West Africa. Bowdich left a wife to fend for herself and their family via her own study of natural history, and one result was Sara Bowdich Lee's beautifully illustrated Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain (1828). The romance with nature certainly cut across class and gender barriers. Stonecutter Hugh Miller could lose himself as easily in geological pursuits as could Charles Darwin or Sir Charles Lyell and Marianne North's passion for plants may well have matched or exceeded that of Kew's famous botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker.

“I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my natural perception of what is natural and true, at a palace door, in Italy or elsewhere, as I would leave my shoes if I were traveling in the East. I cannot forget that there are certain expressions of face, natural to certain passions, and as unchangeable in their nature as the gait of a lion, or the flight of an eagle. I cannot dismiss from my certain knowledge such common-place facts as the ordinary proportions of men’s arms, and legs, and heads; and when I meet with performances that do violence to these experiences and recollections, no matter where they may be, I cannot admire them.”

— Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846)

IN HIS ACCOUNT of his 1844 trip to Rome, Charles Dickens expressed bewilderment that the martyrdom of St. Sebastian should have been so commonly exploited as a subject by Italian artists. The novelist took the opportunity to disparage the “indiscriminate and determined raptures” of certain critics of Renaissance painting as “incompatible with the true appreciation of the really great and transcendent works of art . . . Neither am I partial to libelous Angels, who play on fiddles and bassoons, for the edification of sprawling monks apparently in liquor.” Dickens concluded that representations of St. Sebastian did not “have very uncommon and rare merits, as works of art, to justify their compound multiplication by Italian painters” (195).1

THE GIGANTIC WATER LILY WHOSE seeds were brought to England from the Amazon in 1847 had been sighted a decade earlier in British Guiana by Sir Robert Schomburgk and described in 1837. Named Victoria regia and now known as Victoria amazonica, the spectacular specimen had huge leaves five feet in diameter and seventeen feet in circumference, and flowers more than twelve inches in diameter. Germination of the seeds took some time, but in 1849 three plants developed, and the race was on to propagate the first flower. The triumphal first bud in England opened in early November 1849, its flower measuring three feet in circumference, at the Chatsworth estate of the Duke of Devonshire where the gardener and landscape architect, Joseph Paxton, had designed a greenhouse and water tanks for this purpose; Margaret Darby has detailed the precise attention that Paxton gave to the levels of light, moisture, and heat so as to approximate the plant's native habitat. The Victoria regia produced 126 large, beautiful, and fragrant white and pink tinted flowers. It was a popular wonder and received clamorous public attention for its size, beauty, and surprising strength. Paxton presented a leaf and flower to the Queen and Prince Albert at Windsor, and a well-known engraving in the Illustrated London News, November 17, 1849, showed Paxton's eight-year old daughter Annie standing on one of the leaves. Publication in 1851 of Victoria Regia; or Illustrations of the Royal Water-Lily with life-sized drawings and lithographs by Walter Hood Fitch and descriptions by the botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker brought further celebrity to the plant. Soon after, John and Horatio Mintorn, wax flower artists in London, were commissioned to make a model of the flower of this huge plant in different stages of development – “from the large and bristly bud to the white opening petals, and the full-blown flower, in its beautiful variegation of form and tint” (the Daily News July 17, 1850). Exhibition of the wax model generated wide press coverage about the “fac-simile…of one of the most curious botanical phenomenon of the present age” (Mintorn 1844, ii-iii).