IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, a governess was the primary educator of male and female children in a middle-class household; particularly by virtue of her work educating girls through their mid-teens, the governess simultaneously effected and disrupted the transparent transmission of class and gender identity between generations of middle-class women. Recent scholarship has de-emphasized this pedagogical function in its readings of the figure.1 Discussion has centered, instead, on the ways in which the governess represented a crisis for early Victorian definitions of bourgeois femininity (which centered on middle-class women’s financial dependence and apparent leisure) because she was a middle-class woman who earned her own living. But to read the figure of the Victorian governess through Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is to see that she troubled bourgeois hegemony because of her job. I contend that the governess disturbed the early Victorians not only because she blurred the boundary between the separate spheres, but also because she dramatized the potentially illimitable effects of education. When you hire someone to teach your children, how do you ensure that she is teaching what you wish and as you wish?

Across the span of a single decade, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins published, respectively, a poem and two novels with similarly innovative structures. All three works are multiple narratives; that is, they are narrated by several of their characters who function both as actors and witnesses. All three were immediately popular, and all three continue to be regarded as major achievements of their audiors. The Woman in White, serialized in All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860, quickly became the talk of London and remained so preeminent among Collins's novels that in his will he requested as his epitaph, “author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.” The Ring and the Book, begun in 1864 and inspired by a source that Browning found in 1860, was issued in four volumes, two in 1868 and two in 1869. Like The Woman in White, it was widely discussed and admired, exalting Browning's reputation even among readers who had earlier been critical. The Moonstone, begun in 1867 and published serially in All the Year Round during 1868, was not initially as popular as the other two, although its publisher reported that “crowds of anxious readers” waited for the latest serial installments; but today it is Collins's most celebrated novel, often (though inaccurately) cited as the first detective novel in English.

TWO CARNIVALESQUE EVENTS are referred to in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. One is used as an example in a discussion of political expediency: the Archbishop of Naples is said to have sanctioned, in what would now be called a populist gesture, the St. Januarius procession against the plague (1993, 384; bk. 4, ch. 33). The other is embedded in a simile: the attitude of the British mainstream society to Jews is compared with the attitude of the matrons of Delphi to the tired Maenads who had wandered into their city: the matrons “tenderly” minister to the Bacchae and take them “safely to their own borders” (195; bk. 2, ch. 17).

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?

QUESTIONSABOUT THE PERFORMATIVE NATURE of Victorian culture have received extended attention in the past decade or so as critics have begun to examine the relationship between representation and subjectivity.1 By and large, such studies have fruitfully problematized our received assumptions about the private character of the Victorians. At the same time, however, they have also implicitly privileged the middle-class frames of reference that shape the distinction, for even as they complicate our understanding of performance by calling into question the distinction between public and private modes, critics who take up such issues tend not to question the stability of the categories of experience under scrutiny. As a result, while we gain important new insights into the cultural formation of identity or genre underwritten by the separation of public and private spheres, we also risk reading all Victorians as if their relationships to such ideological formations were identical with those of the emerging middle class.

In the penultimate book ofDaniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth appears in a state of physical and mental shock after the drowning of her detested husband. Exposed to an increasingly popularized discourse of trauma, today's readers would have little trouble in identifying and labeling Gwendolen as a traumatized subject, suffering from a variety of typical symptoms in the aftermath of her terrible experience. She is fixated on the “dead face” of Grandcourt in the water, hallucinating it everywhere. Later, she complains that she “can't sleep much” and that “[t]hings repeat themselves in me so. They come back – they will all come back” (659; ch. 65). Disoriented in the present, she seems to return repeatedly to the past, the line between her interior world and the external world growing increasingly tenuous: “She unconsciously left intervals in her retrospect, not clearly distinguishing between what she said, and what she had only an inward vision of” (594; ch. 56). In her conversation with Daniel Deronda, she is described as being silent for a moment or two, “as if her memory had lost itself in a web where each mesh drew all the rest” (592; ch. 56). Deronda wonders whether she “was she seeing the whole event – her own acts included – through an exaggerating medium of excitement and horror.” (591; ch. 56).

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

I Cor. 15.54

IN MID-CENTURY LONDON there occurred a spectacle of massive proportions, featuring always at its center a corpse. The funeral of the Duke of Wellington, an event that has occasioned surprisingly little critical attention, took place in 1852 and was recognized as one of the greatest public displays of the Victorian period.1 Indeed, many felt it to be one of the most significant public events in the history of Britain, and if Britain, then of course the globe: as the Illustrated London News put it, “[this event] may be said to have surpassed in significant grandeur any similar tribute to greatness ever offered in the world” (Nov. 20, 1852, 430).2 St. Paul’s Cathedral was specially illuminated with six thousand new gas lights in preparation for the ceremony of interment, while the funeral procession, comprised of more than ten thousand marchers, encompassed central London, enjoying an audience numbering more than one and a half million people. Queen Victoria and virtually every major and minor national figure in politics or the arts viewed either the procession or the ceremony at St. Paul’s. The interment was quite literally a multi-media event: the spectacle drew for its effects on numerous disciplines, from literature, music, and journalism to painting, drawing, and architectural design, and spawned in turn editorials, songs, poems, paintings, prints, and engravings.

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit (1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense in Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century (2010), where John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

AT THE END OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’SLady Audley’s Secret (1862), her hero- detective Robert Audley marries the near-identical sister of George Talboys, his one close friend since their days at Eton College years before. Throughout the novel, Braddon characterizes Robert as having effeminate mannerisms and a strong longing to be with George. She consciously makes him an alumnus of Eton College, which one contemporary critic cited as a prime example of “characteristic faults and virtues” of the entire public school system (Payne 35). One perceived “fault” of the public schools in particular was that homosexuality and homoeroticism were condoned among the boys, who were later expected to “become” heterosexual upon graduation. But Robert’s homoerotic urges do not disappear with his “purchase” of a heterosexual marriage at the novel’s end.

I think I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.

* * *

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

— Hardy, “In Tenebris II,” Poems of the Past and the Present

CRITICS HAVE TOO OFTEN dismissed the Gothic elements in Thomas Hardy’s writings as superficial trappings to be found mostly in his minor fiction.1 The aim of this article is to show that the diffusion of Gothic motifs in the whole of Hardy’s literary production is something both intentional and fruitful. The Gothic is indeed a vital part of Hardy’s artistic vision, and it adds to the aesthetic value of his works. His major novels and his poetry are as rife with Gothic lore as his early “minor” fiction.2 This propagation of Gothic elements is central to the dialectic between impregnation and dispersal contained in the etymology of the word “dissemination” (meaning both “sowing” and “scattering”).3

This article explores the representation of “plant horror” in fin de siècle “lost world” novels, from hideously dynamic carnivorous trees to mysterious plant-based drugs with the power to send their victims into torpid apathy. Such freakish flora can contribute to new understandings of the imperial romance novel, specifically in relation to its depiction of threatened masculinities. Combining modern ecocritical research into plant horror with readings of the imperial gothic, this article sheds new light on both fields by challenging the common assumption that both genres often associate the uncanny with moments of accelerated violence. Rather, I argue that these texts are instead most interested in questions of lassitude and stasis, and in problematizing the ideologies of conquest and control that animated British imperialism. Nuancing the ecophobia that is often identified with moments of plant horror, this article interprets nature not as phobic object but as sublimated metaphor for a specifically gendered anxiety. Encounters with the monstrous vegetal serve as an unsettling reminder that male bodies were ultimately disposable, controllable, and replaceable within the flawed economies of Victorian imperialism.

AFTER MINA HARKER awakens from Count Dracula's vampiric embrace, she asks the men around her, but more pointedly herself, “What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days?” (285, ch. 21). As she recounts this perverse seduction in her own words, however, she contradicts her earlier disavowal: “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (284). These conflicting statements capture the peculiar double bind with which Mina struggles throughout Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Many critics concentrate on Dracula himself and the men who do battle with him; interestingly, the novel also develops Mina's complex subjectivity through her unspoken but deep affinity with the vampire. Van Helsing's paranoid observation, “Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina, is changing” (319; ch. 24), epitomizes shifting cultural anxieties at the moment when a long-standing ideological conception of proper femininity comes under suspicious attack. Although nothing seems more natural to Mina than her desire to help her husband in the public sphere while maintaining an intimate friendship with Lucy Westenra in the private, these familiar roles become estranged by the new taxonomies of deviancy popularized during the late nineteenth century.

It may seem that Christmas literature, with its glorified descriptions of overflowing tables and conviviality, has no place in a discussion of that other extreme, starvation. However, much of the nineteenth-century literature containing narratives of Christmas speaks directly to national fears of famine. Starvation entered the print matter of Christmas first as part of a social argument and later as a concern for the abiding national identity that had become intertwined with Christmas itself and, more symbolically, Christmas fare. Writers including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Farjeon, Augustus and Henry Mayhew, the creators of Punch, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon authored Christmas pieces that showcase literary reactions to the developing issues of hunger throughout their century. This essay offers an overview of the treatment of starvation in the Christmas literature of the nineteenth century.

With the growth of the organized feminist movement in England at the end of the 1850s, women began to mount public lecture platforms in increasing numbers. By claiming a space in public assembly rooms through the simple use of their voices, women reformers such as Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon challenged the male privilege of public address, and changed the visual, oral, and aural culture of Victorian reform movements. Women's public speech in the 1850s and 60s was never linked with the kind of riotous responses provoked later by Josephine Butler or the women's suffrage movement. But even public speakers associated with a more moderate or “polite” tone, such as Parkes and Frances Power Cobbe, routinely received a mixture of moral censure and ridicule, causing them to question the value of publicity – both print and platform – for the feminist cause. However, one of the most prolific female public speakers of mid nineteenth-century England, Mary Carpenter (1807–77), seems to have escaped all such criticism and was repeatedly held up as a shining example, by both feminists and non-feminists, of appropriate womanly behavior in official public settings. Commentators on Carpenter's work and her public reputation were nearly unanimous in their approval of not only the content of her public speech but also its flawless delivery. What can Carpenter's apparently unique public persona tell us about shifts in the gendered dimensions of public utterance in the 1850s and 60s, when she was most active? More broadly, what does the history of women's platform speech have to do with a seemingly unrelated narrative: that is, the theorization of juvenile delinquency as a specific problem in nineteenth-century England?

Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it?

— Gaffer Hexam, Our Mutual Friend

WHILE FISHING CORPSES out of the fast-flowing Thames, itself a symbol of death,1 in order to probe their pockets, Gaffer Hexam makes sharp reference to a long-standing distinction regarding the limits of earthly possession. Some of Dickens’s readers would have been quite ready to connect Gaffer’s remarks to Bunyan’s story of Christian’s exodus from the commerce and bustle of the earthly city and his crossing of the river of death that flows before the gates of the celestial city. Others might have considered the riverman’s musings as somehow referring to St. Paul’s saying that “the end of those things [wealth] is death” (qtd. in Welsh 59).2 In the presentation of Gaffer’s ghastly career, however, Dickens points out a dislocation from these earlier views: the riverman desecrates the “muffled human form” he finds just as he truncates (if not turns inside-out) what was once the afterlife’s principal judgment of the use of riches in this lower world (44; bk. 1, ch. 1). According to the text, Gaffer, in sharply dividing spiritual transactions from material ones, and the soul from his or her former possessions, only further mires himself in the “slime and ooze” of the commercial river (43; bk. 1, ch. 1), enabling decay to encroach more aggressively on life.

Critical attention to the dominant tradition of Victorian medievalism has stressed its essentially conservative tendencies. For representative proponents of this tradition – Carlyle, Ruskin, Young England – the imaginative value of the Middle Ages lay in their contrast with the political and social disorder of the present. The antidote to those modern poisons – laissez faire capitalism, Utilitarian ethics, Liberal individualism – lay in a resuscitation of medieval hierarchy, one which called on the Captains of Industry to form a new aristocracy, and the state to assume control over the economy and social welfare. For such thinkers, the spiritual health and organic order of medieval society depended upon its essentially undemocratic structure. The prominence of this analysis has unfortunately overshadowed the importance of two alternative treatments of Victorian medievalism, the Whig and the Socialist. While opposed in fundamental ways to one another, these interpretations are opposed in more significant ways to that dominant conservative tradition in that they created alternative myths of the Middle Ages to justify a more – not less – democratic society in the present and future. Such myths assisted the development of class consciousness by using the authority of history to sanction a social order which drew its moral and political strengths not from the ideals of the aristocracy, but from those of the middle and working classes, respectively. However, the following demonstration of the way similar historical points of departure can lead investigators to radically different conclusions ultimately reinforces the central characteristic of Victorian medievalism: that it represented less an attempt to recapture the past “as it really was” than a projection of current ideals back into time.

In a recent discussion of “Victorian Internationalisms,” the term cosmopolitanism is often used to designate the domain of individual feeling or ethics of toleration in contrast to the more geopolitical terminology of “inter-” or “trans-nationalism” (Goodlad and Wright 5–16). For Goodlad and Wright, the tendency of cosmopolitanism to evoke individual ethos rather than cultural, social, or political process suggests the merits of exploring complementary terms (15). They then go on to discuss authors with “more complicated subject positions than ‘European or American first’” serving other ends than conventional European hegemony (Goodlad and Wright).