How much time has passed since the publication of VLC’s Keywords issue five years ago? This is not a trick question. Students of nineteenth-century British literature and culture are primed to see five years as a long time (“with the length of five long summers”), and events at both national and global scales have encouraged a widespread sense that 2018 is located less in the recent past than on the far side of a divide—in the Before Times. On the other hand, the long view encouraged by a scholarly focus on a period that ended over a century ago may see little or no meaningful time as having passed between 2018 and 2023. Moreover, on a more quotidian level, the very pace of scholarship—the amount of time it typically takes to conceive, research, write, and publish work, even for those without a Casaubonian bone in their bodies—can make five years seem like no time at all (“five summers that flew by,” as Wordsworth might have put it had he been on an academic calendar).

This essay focuses on the proliferation of diverse spiritualities in Victorian Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Theosophy, neopaganism, spiritualism, and emerging occult practices. It makes the case that this proliferation of spiritual thought emerged not in opposition to, but rather in harmony with, the ascendancy of scientific naturalist frameworks in the wake of Darwinism, and that the flexibility of “spirituality” as a concept serves a crucial function for understanding this late Victorian religious landscape. As a (very brief) case study, it examines the fusion of the spiritual and scientific in Marie Corelli's late Victorian bestseller, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Her work, I suggest, highlights the key role of new popular genres of speculative fiction in navigating the boundaries between spirit and matter at the fin de siècle.

Paper represents a potent but underexplored keyword for Victorian studies today. Not only is it the unacknowledged techno-material a priori of Victorian studies itself, but its histories also offer material connections that link literary texts, bureaucracy, and consumer culture to global ecologies and resource extraction.

This article takes up the social production of race in nineteenth-century India through picaresque fiction. Through readings of Rudyard Kipling, Dion Boucicault, and W. M. Thackeray, it shows how picaresque form served as a specific mechanism of racial stabilization, a means of producing a consciously stopgap racial binary through the intervention of a third, triangulating racial term: Irishness. Understanding the triangular structure of whiteness’ “shapeshifting” brings into sharper relief the connections between three important scholarly foci regarding race in India: the ambiguous and fluid boundaries of Anglo-Indian whiteness, the belated assignment of “blackness” to native Indian populations, and the constant resignifications of Irish identity that demographic overrepresentation in India entailed. The case study of the picaresque reveals an imperialist culture more strategic and more self-aware about its own racial construction than is sometimes supposed; the genre served as a key means by which nonmetropolitan colonialist Victorians theorized and constructed their own relation to whiteness.

It is August 2022, and I am sitting in the British Library completing a shamefully late review (this one) when I see the headline: “Trespassers Demand Right to Roam Minister's 12,000 Acre Estate.” One hundred fifty protesters led by activist Nadia Shaikh and complete with a Morris dancing troupe walked into the Englefield estate of Richard Benyon, the UK government minister responsible for access to nature, as part of a campaign around public access to land. Benyon's ancestral estate contains sizeable areas of former common land enclosed by his ancestor, also Richard Benyon, in 1802. Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass, who was at the protest, added:

The 1840s saw the creation of weekly illustrated newsmagazines in several European countries, with titles like the Illustrated London News, L'Illustration, and the Illustrirte Zeitung. This article questions the common assumption that these influential periodicals contributed to modern news time primarily by speeding up the consumption of visual information through rapidly produced and consumed eyewitness accounts. An analysis of the many images of staged public events, like inaugurations, political meetings, and parades, that were published during the early years of illustrated news instead shows than they were often produced as translations of information from different sources (both visual and verbal) and created as pictorial summaries of events in a way that can best be described as “synoptic.” Rather than ephemeral reflections of an ever-changing present, such visual condensations also served to commemorate and make lasting and thus contributed to establishing the very events on which the experience of a fast-forward movement of time was based.

Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) (1856–1935) first met Walter Pater (1839–1894) at Oxford during the summer of 1881, though she was already well acquainted with his work. The extent and import of their relationship, which lasted until Pater's death, has received significant attention by biographers and critics.1 Like many of Lee's friendships, its intimacies were both personal and intellectual—risking, as she put it, “a question of caw-me-caw-you” through reciprocal endorsement.2 The epistolary-averse Pater was uncharacteristically forthcoming in their correspondence, and Lee often stayed with his family when visiting England. The two read aloud from drafts, exchanged books, and met repeatedly on the published page. Indeed, scholars have traced an elegant intertextual arc from Lee's rewriting of Pater's “The Child in the House” (1878) in Belcaro (1881), to her dedication of Euphorion (1884), through her introduction to Juvenilia (1887), and arriving at her “Valedictory” conclusion to Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895).3 By this account, Lee initially adheres to Paterian aesthetics, then grows skeptical of the doctrine's epicurean features, but finds solace when her mentor's late work takes its own ethical turn.

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick's late-career turn to the more modest notion of “reparative reading,” strong knowledge claims are necessary to disrupt the colonial matrix of power that systematically renders both racism and heteronormativity invisible. Rereading Epistemology in light of postcolonial theories of comparison, I argue that, although Sedgwick does not address how the late Victorian “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” takes place within the overall colonial system of power, she nevertheless inhabits a critical position remarkably similar to what Walter Mignolo calls “the border epistemology” of “decolonial thinking.” This entails making universalizing claims that promote the emancipation of disenfranchised groups but also rejecting the imperialist fantasy of critical neutrality in favor of political commitment and historical self-awareness. I end by putting the Sedgwick of Epistemology in dialogue with critical race theorist Sylvia Wynter to suggest how scholars might integrate their respective critical approaches by analyzing the figure of “the human” in Victorian literature and culture.

This essay on the “English-speaking Caribbean” reflects on pasts that have not passed but have instead been passed on, for example in gestures of erasure, silence, or genteel substitution, whether in the Victorian novel or the twenty-first-century novel that insistently returns to the past, or in the rhetoric of law and statecraft. In addition, I consider how Victorianism has reproduced itself in postcolonial Caribbean and British life, with consequences for Black intimacy and kinship.

Population mobility is an analytic category through which we can reconsider nineteenth-century literature and its locations, and not just through an imperial lens. If we look beyond the geographical boundaries of empire, we get a clearer sense of the stakes of Victorian place-making. In this essay I briefly examine a case of two hundred migrants from Scotland to Venezuela in the 1820s as a model for a different kind of analysis that thinks about the impermanent, or fugitive, elements of migration and the ways these intersect with literary study.

The project Literary Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Bengal has been investigating the representation and interpretation of the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in the context of the radical transformations in the physical and ideological landscapes that characterized nineteenth-century Bengal. We are examining the diverse political, economic and scientific influences that shaped the narrative trajectory of literary ecology in nineteenth-century Bengal, which subsequently went on to influence understandings, representations, and interpretations of ecological concerns in the twentieth century.

This brief position paper argues for the importance of understanding Victorian translations, in particular English translations from Asian languages, in relation to the specific places where they were produced and where they were read.

This article reconsiders the racial hierarchies rendering the nonwhite race as the Other in Anglo-American Victorian studies by examining the case of colonial Korea, where both the colonizer and the colonized were people of color. In colonial Korea, reading Victorian and Edwardian literature enabled Koreans to find an alternative humanity beyond the imperial Japanese modernity that stigmatized them. I briefly review how Asian critics located in colonial Korea read Samuel Smiles's Self-Help and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I suggest that their findings included the idea of humanity as a liberal, autonomous self and an environmental subject, both of which challenge the Japanese imposition of modern citizenship named as hwang-gook-shin-min (皇國臣民). I argue that such a response to Victorian literature from a locational perspective not affected by the hierarchical binaries of race or empire suggests that we as contemporary Victorianists (located around the globe) consider “transimperial” solidarity to explore a connection with others outside our immediate national community regardless of racial difference. It also urges us to promote “planetarity” in our reading to embrace willful dislocation accepting heterogeneous locationalities against homogenizing globalization.

In this presentation, I offer some reflections on how Victorianists might understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discursive practices for mapping Africa. I introduce and problematize a series of Victorian-era maps or, more specifically, problematize what such maps represent conceptually, then offer some alternate means by which Victorianists might critically engage with cultural social, and political reality on the nineteenth-century African continent, particularly the more southern and eastern parts of the continent where much of my prior research has focused.

This article explores the unexpected relationship that working-class children had with doll's houses in the late nineteenth century. Placing texts by children's author Frances Hodgson Burnett alongside historical material concerning the manufacture of doll's house furniture by students in London's Ragged Schools under the supervision of housing reformer Octavia Hill, I argue that both women understood the educational or formative value of the doll's house as deriving from the object's ability to teach lessons in temporality. I examine this object and its deployment in contemporary object lessons to show that the spatial divisions of these miniature homes operate in relation to both short- and long-term cycles of time. This article also demonstrates that apparently universal models of selfhood and development were in fact contingent on class structures (both authors, for instance, connect developmental abnormalities in poor children to the fact that they grow up in one-room homes).

This essay argues that certain readers used Pater's work on an artistic period (the Renaissance) in order to periodize the phases of their own lives. Specifically, I suggest that they took up his “school of art” as a model for conditional group membership in a homoerotic culture. Throughout his career, Pater wrote about collectives who reinterpret the past—usually the Renaissance or Ancient Greece and Rome—in order to establish common orientations in the present. However, it is his school concept that comes closest to centering a group's self-conception in this mediation. Examining how Pater's reception realized this potential, I will make two claims. My conceptual claim is that a linguistic term, “register,” would strengthen how we study a particular function of group identity: style as a shared persona that can be put on and off in particular contexts. My historical claim is that a kind of Paterian register, in excess of Pater's personal style and occasionally in opposition to his intentions, enabled a particular sexual culture—the gay phase—at Eton and Oxford in subsequent generations.

This article uses a corpus of manuscript diaries to illuminate the practices and meanings of everyday mobility that shaped the lives of nineteenth-century Englishwomen. The female pedestrian has typically been characterized by scholars as a marginal or transgressive figure whose movements are interpreted through comparison to a masculine peripatetic tradition. “A Voyage of Discovery” seeks to broaden our understanding of what it meant to move through the world as a woman in the nineteenth century. Drawing from the narrated experiences of a broad range of little-known diarists, this article outlines a paradigm of “everyday adventure” to describe walking's status as an unremarkable act that nevertheless creates the potential for event and variety. In so doing, it expands on feminist concepts of the everyday, elaborates on the under-theorized relationship between walking and the body, and reassesses the boundaries of socially acceptable mobility.

Nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian and British narratives represent the Indian Revolt of 1857 as an event with a rich gustatory grammar—a problem of greased cartridges, adulterated flour and salt, and mysterious chapatis. Contemporary colonial sources report the circulation of chapatis across North Indian villages on the eve of the revolt. To this day, these chapatis remain inscrutable. This essay traces the chapati from the Anglo-Indian table to the Kanpur trenches in the first English-language novel of the revolt, Edward Money's The Wife and the Ward (1859). The chapati, as a domestic edible, functions as an index of assimilation. It adulterates its Anglo-Indian eater bodily and morally. It weaves together adulteration and adultery, to demonstrate the gendered colonial politics of bodily purity. As a food of revolt, the chapati is portrayed as a text of Indian fears of bodily contamination. I argue that The Wife and the Ward displaces Anglo-Indian fears of bodily adulteration onto Indian rebels. I examine how the novel reworks Anglo-Indian panic to analyze its schizophrenic nature—consuming chapatis in India while upholding British racial politics of purity and contamination. This bifurcation is conjured in the very term “Anglo-Indian”: always imbricated in the simultaneous and contradictory impulses to assimilate while maintaining difference.

This article contends that George Eliot's higher critical approach to biblical prophecy led her to interpret prophetic knowledge about the future as a product of historical scholarship rather than supernatural revelation. This interpretation bore creative fruit in Eliot's 1862–63 novel Romola, a book that repeatedly condemns the irrational ethos of supernatural prophecy by rebuking mystical seers’ emotional volatility and their ignorance of history. As a rational alternative to supernaturalism, Romola upholds a serious, scholarly mode of prophecy whose power to predict the future derives from historical research. Recasting prophecy as a rational mode of historical scholarship enables Romola to deploy it as a method of intellectually responsible political analysis. In the process of conflating the prediction of the future with the study of history, the rational prophetic mode demands that political visionaries must temper utopian promises about a cosmopolitan future with sober-minded analyses of the intercultural violence that has plagued the past. By revealing cosmopolitan utopia's historical limitations, Eliot's prophetic mode ultimately promotes a “cosmopocalyptic” form of politics.

Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) has been praised for its careful attention to the relationship between humans and their environment. Hardy traces the intricate relationship between local community, ecosystem, economy, and national political structures with surprising fluidity. This essay argues that his attention to detail provides an important account of the function of the wasteland in English historical development. In doing so, it also establishes the category of waste as a functional element of the character networks of narrative fiction. While Hardy's attention to waste emerges from a respect for the English rural laborer and a nostalgia for precapitalist modes of social and economic life, his valorization of English parsimony and imagination nonetheless subtend a form of nationalism coextensive with the production of British imperial ideology.