The question of Shelley's influence on the young Robert Browning is hardly a disputed one, but the question of how far it continues into the life and work of the later Browning is quite a different matter. While the early influence is readily acknowledged, the later hardly receives the amount of attention it deserves. The consensus among critics has long been that in his youth Browning had a great enthusiasm for Shelley, an enthusiasm clearly apparent in Pauline and Paracelsus, but abruptly extinguished in Sordello. Generally speaking, it would seem that Browning's ardent enthusiasm for Shelley the poet ends with Sordello in 1840, just as his respect for Shelley the man ends in 1856, with the discovery that he had abandoned his first wife. Any evidence for a lapse of his disaffection in later life seems effectively countered by Browning's own testimony in a letter written in 1885 to F. J. Furnivall, refusing the presidency of the newly formed Shelley Society: “For myself, I painfully contrast my notions of Shelley the man and Shelley, well, even the poet, with what they were sixty years ago, when I only had his works, for a certainty, and took his character on trust.” With these highlights of the relationship, most Browning critics and biographers terminate the discussion.

In 1865, an unknown author calling himself Lewis Carroll compelled a leading publishing house, Macmillan & Company, to suppress the first edition of a children's book entitled Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1886, the same author, better established, instructed the same publisher to dispose of the first edition of The Game of Logic, also meant for children, as not up to his standards of book production. In 1889, Carroll condemned the entire first run often thousand copies of The Nursery “Alice”; and in 1893, when he found that a later run (the sixtieth thousand) of Through the Looking-Glass had come from the presses with the illustrations not well printed, he ordered Macmillan to scuttle those copies as well.

Samuel Clemens' infatuation with the poetry of Robert Browning during and after the 1880s demonstrates the subtle dimensions in Browning's verse that a gifted oral interpreter can disclose. Whatever first attracted Clemens to the Browning canon, however, it was not the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When Clemens began courting Olivia Langdon she was already a partisan of Mrs. Browning's works, and the couple had several good-natured exchanges about the intelligibility of her poems. In a letter of 17 May 1869 Clemens jocularly alluded to “some dark & bloody mystery out of the Widow Browning”; on another occasion he turned to Livy for an explanation of obscurities in Aurora Leigh.* In the second week of Livy Clemens' marriage she appended a teasing note to the letter which Clemens was writing to Mrs. Mary Mason Fairbanks, vowing that she, along with Clemens' sister and niece, “will make Mr Clemens read aloud to us in Mrs Browning—Felicity to us—but what to him?”* Around 1872 Clemens declared, in a letter written to Livy, “If they were to set me to review Mrs. Browning, it would be like asking you to deliver judgment upon the merits of a box of cigars.”

FROM “MY LAST DUCHESS” to The Picture of Dorian Gray, portraits are ubiquitous in Victorian literature – lurking behind velvet curtains or stowed in locked attics, their canvases turned to the wall. The literary portrait, a variation on the copious nineteenth-century description typical of the Victorian novel, provides a verbal representation of physical appearance that most conspicuously functions to establish character. Literary portraits work vicariously, asking readers to conceptualize imaginatively what the characters actually see, requiring that they visualize a painting – see it in their mind's eye. Verbal and visual, private and portable, the literary portrait is a memento of an exciting reading experience. To better understand the appeal of literary portraits in the Victorian era, we might explore the effects of verbal description and the psychosexual impulses motivating the production of literary portraits. Victorian literary portraits commonly fetishize female subjects for a purportedly male gaze; even post-Freud, psychoanalysts view fetishism as a primarily masculine proclivity (Metz 89). Novels such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), to name only one among many, present a fetishistic portrait that seems to be a classic illustration of Mulvey's observation that “[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (11). Film theory offers literary critics ways to theorize specularization – the behavior of “looking” – that precinematic viewers could not yet articulate.

DEBATES ABOUT FEMALE EMIGRATION to the British colonies throughout the Victorian era routinely capitalize on the crucial role women could play in consolidating the empire through the civilizing mission. Advocates of female emigration frequently publicized the benefits of “matrimonial colonization,” a rendering of what is now called republican motherhood that defines women’s place in the nation in terms of their domestic and reproductive roles.1 The founding in 1862 of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCES) by two educated middle-class women, Maria Rye and Jane Lewin, marked a departure from this conventional approach to female emigration. The work of the FMCES was carried out in the spirit of energy and determination that characterized the period of growing feminist activity in the 1860s, when the British rhetoric about “superfluous” women was reaching the tenor of a national crisis.2 While campaigns for improving female education and employment opportunities were long-term solutions to the problem, emigration offered a more immediate palliative. Concerned primarily with the plight of single, middle-class women, Rye and Lewin saw in emigration an alternative plot to the tragic denouement in poverty and spinsterhood that awaited a large proportion of Britain’s population of single, unemployed women. Ignoring the civilizing mission and the inducements for genteel women to marry or to become domestic servants in the colonies,3 Rye and Lewin instead focused on creating a class-differentiated access into colonialism by enabling single middle-class women, most of whom were governesses,

In 1893, overwhelmed by readers' insatiability for Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his detective off at the height of his popularity. Writing to a friend in 1896, Doyle described how literally sick he was of the figure he had created: “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (Chabon 17). Holmes's (first) literary demise was marked by his creator with a culinary simile, one which recalls that his literary debut was made under the name that, above all others, stood for the culinary in late nineteenth-century Britain: Isabella Beeton. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Three other editors had rejected the story before the Beeton Annual accepted it. This Doyle-Beeton publishing encounter was an instance of one publishing phenomenon recognizing another one and ushering it into the limelight. When Doyle's reflections on his huge publishing success turn to a gustatory memory of overindulgence in a purposefully overdeveloped organ, it raises the following question: what were the relationships between the mass market, the culinary, and the production and adjudication of judgment and refinement in the nineteenth century?

[Hardy] is too fond — and the practice has been growing on him through all his later books — of writing like a man “who has been at a great feast of languages and stole the scraps,” or, in plain English, of making experiments in a form of language which he does not seem clearly to understand, and in a style for which he was assuredly not born. (Mowbray Morris)

No reader can fail to notice — and few critics have failed to deplore — the ponderous allusions to literature and art which strew with their initial capitals the pages of Hardy’s early novels. . . . The mark of the autodidact is perhaps to be found not so much in what he knows as in how he regards the world of knowledge. . . . Hardy may have known more than many a man with a university education, but he lacked the kind of intellectual as well as social assurance that such an education might have given him. (Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, Michael Millgate)

DESPITE A GAP OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS between these two statements, they exhibit little difference with regard to an issue that has drawn critical comment since first publication of Thomas Hardy’s novels: the language of the texts. Morris and Millgate both disapprove of Hardy’s style because of its overt use of quotation, but behind this lies the view that good style depends upon correct language, and that the ability to use language correctly is the preserve of a select few by virtue of their class or education. In the one hundred years and more since Hardy wrote the novels, there are many instances of critics sharing this opinion. And yet, of course, from the early 1970s onwards, new theoretical approaches to language have increasingly dominated critical practice, changing rapidly the premises of literary interpretation. More specifically, the relationship between literature, language, and education has been theorized as an ideological matrix requiring precise historical and political analysis. The late nineteenth century in England, with its dramatic changes in State Education and the cultural crisis leading to fin-de-siècle decadence has proved fertile ground for investigations of these issues, which have indeed cited Hardy’s texts in the process.1 This article invokes that research in its focus upon Jude the Obscure — the novel by Hardy that most explicitly explores the links between education, literature, and language in the context of class.

By the mid-nineteenth century, British women had ample motivation for imagining forms of charity that did not require money. Property laws continued to deprive most married women of personal wealth and new statistics revealed a “surplus” of unmarried middle-class women lacking employment. Elizabeth Gaskell addressed these financial challenges by envisioning alternative forms of economic power for women. Her novella Cranford (1851–53) depicts a community of shabby-genteel women who support each other, in the virtual absence of men, through gift practices. Using principles of sympathetic and economic conservation, Cranford's system of exchange reworks material limitations, turning these women's lack of private property to their advantage. Cranford is among a number of mid-century works that treat sympathetic exchange in a sustained manner and on an expanded scale, writing women's charity in terms of sympathy and sisterhood rather than coin. By doing so, it not only co-opts the traditional province of the upper class by pitting middle-class women's care-giving against unfeeling wealth, but also defines a sympathetic gift economy in opposition to the masculinized marketplace essential to such models of charity as that of Dickens's turkey-buying Scrooge.

BY THE EARLY 1820s, medievalist representations of the British nation, such as those disseminated through Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, had increasingly displaced longstanding, Francophobic forms of nationalist imagery popular throughout Britain during the century of wars against France before 1815. The “medieval revival” of the early nineteenth century provided inspiration for a new strain of nationalist imagery and discourse that would evolve and help to shape British subjects for nearly a century preceding the Great War. Scholarship since Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order (1970) has widely explored the literary and artistic development of medievalism in the nineteenth century. What needs further discussion or theorization are the cultural uses of nineteenth-century medievalist representations of the British nation, its history, aristocracy, and chivalric ideology. What also needs further discussion are the subject-forming and nation-forming implications of texts by popular, recently revived medievalist writers such as Felicia Hemans (Figure 5).

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wilde's writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.

On September 3, 1841, George Eliot wrote in a letter to her friend Maria Lewis:

Behold an infinite of floating worlds
Divide the crystal waves of ether pure,
In endless voyage without port

Amid those sov'reign glories of the skies,
Of independent, native lustre, proud;
The souls of systems! and the lords of life,
Through their wide empires! (276)

The oriental ballet is typically associated with modern dance, Russia, and the nonpareil dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Michel Fokine, Anna Pavlova, and Ruth St. Denis. One of the most excerpted of all classical ballets and considered the first example of the abstract form in modern dance is the “Kingdom of the Shades” sequence in Marius Petipa's La Bayadère, featuring thirty-two ghosts of Hindu temple dancers dressed in white entering the stage one by one with a simple arabesque cambre. What people often forget is that La Bayadère was a huge sensation in Europe during the romantic ballet years – the 1830s and 40s – 50 plus years before the Ballets Russes and a full generation before Petipa's 1877 production, which most assume to be the ballet's original. This and other grand operas and ballets of its kind – Lalla Rookh, Les Orientales, Le Corsair, La Peri, La Paquita, Revolt of the Harem – took romanticism beyond the pale in terms of visual extravagance; elaborate water systems were installed to depict bathing scenes and shipwrecks, and live horses and elephants brought onto the stage to add verisimilitude to the Eastern spectacle.

The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential – and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. (Simone de Beauvoir xxxiv)

The name [of poet]

Is royal, and to sign it like a queen

Is what I dare not, – though some royal blood

Would seem to tingle in me now and then,

With sense of power and ache.

Aurora Leigh I. (934–38)

'Tis Antidote to turn –

To Tomes of solid Witchraft –

(Emily Dickinson, #593)

“Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence – these are the qualities that hold us enthralled” as we read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1932 (1.212). As Woolf points out, these qualities emanate not so much from Aurora as from her creator, whose strong and lively presence so pervades the poem that “Again and again … Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. … [making it] impossible for the most austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his [sic] eyes should be fixed upon the page” (212). And as Woolf observes, the “flesh” the critic touches is that of a woman who knows that the royal blood of poets flows through her veins. “Elizabeth the actual” is a subject, speaking boldly of the world as she perceives and experiences it.

Margaret oliphants ghost story “The Library Window” (1896) — one of the last works of its author's prolific career — is haunted by images of reading and writing. Visiting her aunt, the young narrator (never named) reads obsessively, perched in the window seat where she witnesses another scene of textuality. Some claim that a window in the college library across the street is only “fictitious panes marked on the wall” (296), yet in a series of increasingly vivid tableaux the girl sees through those panes a young man seated in a study “writing, writing always” (305). So entranced is she by this vision of scholarship, so convinced of its reality, that she is devastated to learn the window is indeed a fake and the young man a ghost who appears to her because of a curse on the female members of her family: he was killed by the brothers of another young girl — the narrator's ancestor — when they mistakenly assumed he was responding to her flirtatious overtures as she waved to him across the street.

IN 1861 AMY LEVY was born into a middle-class Anglo-Jewish family with deep roots in England, and was part of the first generation of women at Cambridge University. Her life was marked by the opportunities and predicaments of Anglo-Jews at a pivotal moment in their history. Receiving full political rights in 1858, two years before Levy was born, England’s Jews attained positions of status in the late-Victorian period and became integrated into the fabric of British society. Todd Endelman, however, like other commentators on Anglo-Jewry in this period, gives the British a mixed evaluation on their treatment of the Jews. Tolerant in many ways, England was “hostile to the notion of cultural diversity. Circles and institutions quite willing to tolerate Jews as intimate associates were not willing to endorse the perpetuation of a separate Jewish culture or to see any value in the customs or beliefs of the Jewish religion” (209).

In THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875), the Melmottes’ origins remain a mystery that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Few of Augustus Melmotte's business partners venture to inquire too closely into the specious public faith in his financial integrity even as they prepare to extract the promising output of his highly speculative enterprises. On the contrary, a suspicion that their seemingly stable investments are as unsafe as they are spurious, that they bear the marks of risky speculation, accompanies the rise of the commercial Melmotte Empire from its beginnings. Close inquiry is not so much guarded against as shirked by those who wish to believe in it. When aristocratic would-be investors scramble for a seat on the boards of this “New Man,” they are therefore guilty not simply of nourishing a fraudulent financier whose history as a swindler they are well aware of, for Melmotte's connections to continental scams are notorious. Rather, they are building on ambivalent attitudes to the seemingly successful speculator. Just as the instability associated with speculation is conveniently embodied by an international man of mystery in the worst sense, it can also be exorcised just as easily by his self-destruction.

ALTHOUGH VICTORIAN REVIEWERS uniformly praised Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the “sincere” poetic voice of Sonnets from the Portuguese, they often blamed her for faulty craft. In structure and rhyme scheme the poems in the sequence recall the Petrarchan tradition, suggesting the idealized love that accompanies it, yet their varied syntax and diction seem more conversational than ideal. Enjambment usually destroys the integrity of octave and sestet. Then in the Sonnets Barrett Browning continued her use of odd rhymes, which had been raising critical eyebrows since earlier poems. For example, in the most famous sonnet — XLIII, “How do I love thee?” — Barrett Browning rhymed the noun phrase “put to use” (9) with the infinitive “to lose” (11) and rhymed “faith” (10) with “breath” (12). Victorian reviewers, somewhat disoriented, offered a variety of explanations for these apparent technical lapses. Some attributed them to a defective ear for music (“Review of Poems” 278; [Massey] 517).1 George Saintsbury — taking the lead from the controversy over the “cockney school” of poetry — reproved Barrett Browning, born to the educated classes, for relying out of laziness on vulgar pronunciation to force rhymes instead of taking the time to discover correct ones (280–81). Even her poet-friend and correspondent, Mary Russell Mitford, wondered if isolation at Wimpole Street had led to an overly narrow experience with proper pronunciation of English (reported in Horne 458; see also Hayter 38–39). Victorian reproofs and anecdotes like these followed Barrett Browning’s work into the formalist twentieth century.

It has recently been suggested, in various quarters, that cosmopolitanism, a concept that has proved broadly useful and popular in Victorian studies in the last several years, may have entered its critical senescence. The reports of its decline are, I believe, greatly exaggerated. I would like to prove the continuing vigor of the concept by using it in a reading of Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61). Conceiving of the cosmopolitan figure as a mediator between native English and colonial subjectivities, I will argue that Pip and Magwitch are reluctant cosmopolitans of indeterminate national identity. Although their final lack of a home country represents a psychological loss, the sympathy they learn to feel for each other – a fellow-feeling between gentleman and convict produced by a transnational irony enacted across class and cultural divides – represents a clear ethical gain, the attainment of a partial universalism that goes to the heart of the moral vision of the novel. Throughout this study, I will seek to extend that “rigorous genealogy of cosmopolitanism” that Amanda Anderson has urged (“Cosmopolitanism” 266).

I WOULD RATHER not think of Victorian studies and cultural studies in antithesis because both terms are misleading and obstruct research. We should not be choosing between either, but trying to think of a way of working that dissolves this antithesis. The first point I would like to make is that Victorian studies came into being as an interdisciplinary project just after the second world war — the journal of that name started up in the fifties. So, paradoxically, Victorian studies emerged conceptually after modernism was over and the study of modernism was well under way. I think that one of the reasons why Victorian studies appeared post-war was slightly suspect — the seeming comfort of a period not torn by the anguish of war (wrong — there were colonial wars going on all the time, they just were forgotten). A little while ago I looked to see if Victorian Studies contained any kind of statement about its project when it began. The first issue of Victorian Studies in September 1957 contained a cautious statement about its project, describing the Victorian “era” in terms of “events and personalities” and speaking of the “coordination” of disciplines rather than their transformation (3). This was innovative for its time, but imposed conceptual limits on research. If one looks back at the early issues, they are impressively scholarly and seem to be doing bits of history so-called official historians do not do.