Recent guidebooks for the Westerner traveling to Northern India generally refer the prospective visitor to a common range of cities around Delhi – Agra, Jaipur, and Udaipur; within these, the Taj Mahal, Jaipur's Pink City and nearby Amber Fort, and Udaipur's glamorous lake palaces usually merit must-see status. Until its refurbishment a few years ago, the Albert Hall Museum, an elaborate structure with old-fashioned interiors and a location a kilometer south of Jaipur's city center, ranked as a second- or even third-tier tourist attraction; travel guides from recent years mention it with indifference, describing its collections as “dusty” and “fine, if carelessly exhibited” (Bindloss and Singh 170), or even suggesting that “a slow circular turn around the building in a car will suffice” (Frommers 520). Yet a century ago the Museum proudly occupied a primary place in British travel guides to India. It opened with ceremony and fanfare in 1887, and by 1898 almost three million Indian and over ten thousand European visitors had passed through its doors (Hendley, Report 9). A striking example of colonial architecture, constructed of white stone with numerous courtyards, covered walkways, and ornamented domes (Figure 1), it was regarded as perhaps the most noteworthy edifice within a noteworthy Indian city. Thomas Holbein Hendley, resident Surgeon-Major in Jaipur, chief curator for the 1883 Jaipur Exhibition, and the Albert Hall Museum's Secretary and tireless champion, recommended that travelers in Jaipur for a single day make two visits, both morning and evening, to the site, and that those with an additional day to spend in the city schedule a third visit. Murray's Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon concurred, describing it as “a beautiful museum – an Oriental South Kensington, suitably housed” (174), and just after the turn of the century, English journalist Sidney Low recalled that it was “the best museum, with one exception, in all India, a museum which, in the careful selection and the judicious arrangement of its contents, is a model of what such an institution ought to be” (114).

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?

Three black dolls appear in the etchings by H. K. Browne (Phiz) that accompany Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853). They hang, strange fruit, from strings on walls and in shop windows, and their purpose as commentary on the text remains unclear because it is also initially unclear what they might represent. The dolls are never mentioned in the text of the novel, nor do they receive any substantial criticism in readings of Bleak House's illustrations. This article plumbs the archive for evidence of the dolls, and uses the resulting range of associations, from the American cotton trade to Victorian advertising techniques, to argue for a greater integration of the analysis of text and illustrations in serialized, illustrated novels such as Bleak House. Material culture readings of the novel to this date have overlooked elements of the illustrations (which are themselves material objects), or have focused on illustrations as print culture, and not conversations with the written text. Examining the dolls in this context not only enriches Bleak House, but also attests to the value of observing the interplay of text and illustration, as well as text and advertising, in readings of the novel's serialized form.

Tennyson's poem The Princess (1847) has long intrigued readers with its polarizing gender politics and playful, lilting verses recounting the grim bloodshed that results when an ambitious Princess establishes a women's college. The frame narrative focuses on a group of friends at a summer party who are inspired by a tale of an ancient warrior queen, who “sallying thro’ the gate, / Had beat her foes with slaughter from her walls” (Prologue 30–34). At some moments jocular and at others acerbic, the men spin the Princess's story, with the women of the gathering providing interludes of music between the tales. In the narrative that unfolds, the Princess establishes a separatist women's college deep in the country, but counter to her plans, a neighboring prince has determined to make her his wife. Along with two friends, the Prince sneaks into the school disguised as a woman. Comedy and romance ensue, leading to the Prince's eventual unmasking and a deadly serious battle between his father and the Princess's father over how her body will be disposed in marriage. The Prince is wounded in the battle and the Princess is smitten with remorse. While nursing him back to health she is “ultimately transformed from a fierce feminist into a broken nurse” (Buchanan 573) as she anticipates the possibilities of agency through marriage and motherhood. The poem ends with the disbanding of the Princess's school and the reinstallation of its female leaders under patriarchal control.

Around 1847, an author describing himself as “A Discharged officer with twenty years’ experience” published a book entitled The Mysteries of the Madhouse. It commences as a novel: the third-person narrative tells a thrilling tale complete with a harmless heir, conniving step-mother, and gormless step-brother. But after the heir of Howarth House is committed to a madhouse by his step-mother, the genre of the text changes abruptly. With no transition, the language of the novel is suddenly interrupted by extended, first-person, ostensibly factual accounts of what conditions are like inside madhouses.

The story of Jack Sheppard, a jailbreaker hanged for theft in 1724, inspired William Harrison Ainsworth in 1839 to write a historical romance chronicling and fictionalizing Sheppard's exploits. Though first published in a middle-class magazine, Ainsworth's serialization of Sheppard's career in Jack Sheppard: A Romance (1839–1840) subsequently caused a sensation among lower-class audiences for whom the novel was not originally intended. The wide dissemination of Sheppard's story among the lower classes in ballads, songs, cheap plagiarisms, and theatrical performances created a moral panic for contemporary middle-class critics who were concerned with the implications of such material in lower-class culture. Thus, despite the novel's initial reception in the middle-class press as another pleasant and harmless romance, it soon became reviled as a source of inspiration for would-be Jack Sheppards everywhere.

While literary critics have become increasingly engaged by the impact of suburbanization on the literary landscape, most scholarship has focused on texts from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The belief that suburbia appeared only occasionally in literature before this period is commonplace: as Gail Cunningham observes: “Although the term ‘suburb’ was used from Shakespeare and Milton onwards . . . it was not until the final decades of the nineteenth century that writers turned to suburban life as a subject of imaginative investigation” (Cunningham, “Riddle” 51). Cunningham's important work on suburban narrative positions authors of the late nineteenth century as architects of “the new imaginative category suburban,” one that was substantially shaped by the experience of observing and living amongst “newly massed middle classes” (Cunningham, “Riddle” 52). “[F]or many writers . . . the prime response to the new suburbia was one of anxiety and disorientation,” she argues. “How were they to conceptualize the sudden appearance of the new spatial environment?” (Cunningham, “Houses” 423). Yet Cunningham's emphasis on the newness of both the category and the lived experience underestimates the impact of suburbanization on the totality of the period. Suburbanization was a phenomenon that Victorian society had been experiencing, and responding to, for at least eight decades by the time of Victoria's death. Literary narratives engaging suburbia from these eight decades undoubtedly exist: they have received scant critical attention, yet they constitute a crucial tradition without which the most famous late-nineteenth-century texts of suburbia cannot be adequately understood.

Accounting for the prevalence of enmity in nineteenth-century Western culture, Peter Gay evinces some surprise at the tenacious grip of the meek upon their aggression, which appears to satisfy a basic necessity of life. Uriah Heep alone attests to the harmony between Charles Dickens's social imagination and Gay's critical assessment that the Victorians had cause to treat their self-effacing neighbors with as much caution as the bellicose. But what about the more resignedly “umble” and solemnly self-diminishing denizens of Dickens's fictional world: the good girls at the center of so many novels? Why do aggression and resentment seem less compatible with their humility than with Heep's? Because, I would suggest, they are little. Littleness is certainly an idealized quality of girls in Dickens's novels. In particular, Nell Trent and Amy Dorrit share the epithet “little” as an indication of their preciousness, physical smallness, modesty, and, most importantly, self-abnegation in service of others. As a number of critics have observed, this selflessness takes many forms, including starvation, over-work, and self-erasure. Such extremes of compassionate resolve and willful self-limitation, however, intimate the strictness of the nice girl and the difficulty of measuring up to her (as a) standard. Dickens himself set this bar – if not precisely high, at so low a level as to require painstaking self-contortion to pass under it – in an 1847 speech to the Mechanics’ Institution at Leeds where he described women as “those who are our best and dearest friends in infancy, in childhood, in manhood, and in old age, the most devoted and least selfish natures that we know on earth, who turn to us always constant and unchanged, when others turn away” (Fielding 83). This definition of the best feminine endowments recognizes no difference between girls and women, because the female half of the human population remains “constant and unchanged” in service of male needs. Although Dickens calls upon women to be the bigger person in a moral sense, for girls, growing up appears a matter of remaining little, selfless, “constant.” For good self-effacing Victorian girls like Little Nell and Little Dorrit, aggression thus is necessary because enforcing self-negation requires enormous will power, but also perhaps because aggression guards the last modicum of selfhood belonging to those for whom selflessness is socially prescribed.

In the years following the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë's social circle expanded rapidly, extending far beyond the narrow circumference of Haworth Parsonage. The later letters attest to personal acquaintance with many prominent literary contemporaries, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes, and William Thackeray. Yet, second perhaps only to Thackeray, the writer that Brontë credits as most influential to her thinking about art and narrative is one that she never did meet: John Ruskin. Brontë's initial exposure to Ruskin's work came through the channel of their shared publisher, George Smith, who in 1848 sent her a copy of the first two volumes of Modern Painters.

For much of the twentieth century, literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.

That Algernon Charles Swinburne loved the Brontës is well known, and his interest in them well documented. His admiration for Charlotte and Emily, in particular, prompted two studies, a short book and an article, which were instrumental in establishing their critical reputation as it exists today. “Those great twin sisters in genius,” as he wrote in 1877, held a powerful sway over Swinburne's imagination (A Note 188–200). He considered them his Yorkshire kinswomen, bred in the wild borderlands of the North (although Swinburne was born in London and spent most of his life in southern England, his family was based in Northumberland, and he never lost his allegiance to the county, calling himself a “Borderer” to the very end). He sensed in their work – Emily's especially – the haunting, poetic influence of the moors, a passionate, romantic spirit that saturated his own verse and prose. More, they were his novelistic predecessors, and his essays on them shed considerable light on his own fictional practice. In framing himself as the Brontës’ apologist, Swinburne was “far ahead of his time,” shaping Victorian criticism (Hyder 15–16). His praise of Wuthering Heights is considered “by some literary historians to be epochmaking” and altered the way in which novels were discussed, analysed, and ultimately evaluated (Watson 247). There are also striking features that suggest Swinburne's own novel Lesbia Brandon – in its trans-genre form and unique milieu – was conceived as an exercise in the manner of Wuthering Heights.

While it is well-known that Victorian women married for financial stability, sexual desire, or social standing, doctors of the time provided another reason: health. Medical texts warned women to make use of their reproductive abilities, to have children to avoid becoming masculine old maids. One anonymous contributor to an 1851 issue of the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology believed the old maid to be physically unwomanly as a result of childlessness.

When Elizabeth Gaskell died in November 1865, she left unfinished her final novel, Wives and Daughters (1864–66). The Cornhill Magazine's editor, Frederick Greenwood, published a tribute to Gaskell with the novel's final installment. Her fiction, he wrote, pulls you from “an abominable wicked world, crawling with selfishness and reeking with base passions into one where there is much weakness, many mistakes, sufferings long and bitter, but where it is possible for people to live calm and wholesome lives . . .” (Gaskell 685–86; ch. 60). As Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund observe, Greenwood shaped Gaskell's reputation for a hundred years “as an author whose work captured . . . the idyllic charm of a lost era” and took “readers away from unpleasant realities” (158). Notably, Greenwood's list of “unpleasant realities” (wickedness, selfishness, and base passions) implicitly refers to capitalism — that is, to the economic world of the 1860s from which Gaskell ostensibly encouraged her readers to retreat.

The association between mountaineering and taking risks is conventional and has been so since mountaineering emerged in Western Europe as a distinct preoccupation during the first half of the nineteenth century. Whatever else mountaineering might be about, it has always at least been about risk. Scholarship on English alpinism in its formative period – the first two decades of the second half of the nineteenth century – has long acknowledged this association. Scholarship has, however, only begun to recognize the complex nature of risk in early English alpinism.

On 19 May 1868 the Conservative MP Percy Wyndham rose in the House of Commons to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department “whether he is aware that Publications, the sale of which has been condemned by a Court of Law, are now being openly offered for sale in the Streets of London, and such being the case, whether the Police have power to interfere?” Gathorne Hardy replied that

In the past twenty years, given the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies and its inquiry into the identity politics of race, ethnicity, and imperialism, significantly more critical attention has been paid to Charlotte Brontë's portrayal of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847) than in the prior one hundred and forty years of Brontë scholarship. While in The Madwoman and the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar present an earlier reading of Bertha as “Jane's truest and darkest double” (360), any reading of Bertha's darkest in terms of a cultural or racialized identity came about in later criticism. Gayatri Spivak was instrumental in positioning Bertha within a discourse of imperialism rather than reading her merely in psychological terms, which then precipitated more recent studies on Bertha's colonial heritage, her financial and cultural imperialist inheritance and her ambiguous ethnic status as a Creole women. Contemporary critics have also addressed how Rochester in a sense becomes Bertha's “truest and darkest double.” However, his darkness has proven to be far more quizzical, for unlike Bertha he is neither Creole nor raised in the West Indies; quite to the contrary, Rochester was desired by the Masons precisely because of his heritage, being “of a good race.” Still, as readers, we have had to grapple with Brontë's numerous descriptions of Rochester's dark visage.

The Victorian novel is dominated by heroines, its narrative driven by their impulses and their irrepressible physicality. These women possess a strong visual presence that is intrinsically bound with the way in which they choose to dress themselves, with authorial attention consistently focusing on the elements of their clothing. The body was a highly visible, and more significantly, a readable cultural symbol in the Victorian period, with its signifying ability vitally linked to the clothes that adorned it. Clothes have often been employed in literary metaphors – words as the clothing of thought, clothes as a masking of the real, and so on. In his long poem In Memoriam, A.H.H., Tennyson succinctly deploys the quiet grief contained in the idea of widow's weeds, bringing together the expressivity of both clothes and words, when he writes: “In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, / Like coarsest clothes against the cold” (stanza 5, ll. 9–10). But in the realist Victorian novel, clothes become even more pertinent, offering a useful descriptive device that is pivotal to the creation of a believable, legible character. The awareness of clothing as something that has potential for both restriction of identity as well as expression of it permeates much of Victorian writing, with numerous novels rendering visible the construction of a coherent selfhood through clothing.

By now, arguments about the familiarity of realism in general, and the novels of Anthony Trollope in particular, are themselves familiar. D. A. Miller's suggestion that the “easy chair” is “still the most likely place to read Trollope” because such a location is congenial to novels that allow one to fall “into the usual appreciation of his appreciation of the usual” is the touchstone of such arguments (107). In Trollope's own day, reviewers and commentators did not use the term “the usual” to describe the domain of his novels, but they convey the same notion as Miller by maintaining that the transparency of his novels creates verisimilitude. What follows here suggests that an “easy chair” is not “the most likely place” to read Trollope. I reveal the surprising extent to which Trollope himself investigates and thinks at length about “the usual,” instead of merely allowing his reader to “appreciate” the transparency of his novels, by attending to his ideas about classical perspective in relationship to the novel form. I focus on Trollope's complicated relationship to issues of classical perspective because the transparency of his novels described by his contemporaries continues into today's critical descriptions of his novels as the domain of the ordinary, the everyday, and the familiar. Such descriptions, however, do not fully illuminate Trollope's own complicated relationship to issues of perspective. I throw Trollope's own ideas on perspective into full relief in an effort to disrupt accounts of his work that emphasize its natural qualities. On the one hand, Trollope's work is described by contemporaries as perspectival, and his own comments in his Autobiography and his handling of issues of intimacy in his novels demonstrate what he sees as the virtues of perspectivalism. Foremost among those virtues is the ability of perspectivalism to abstract its observer, which is confirmed as Trollope accomplishes a universal, generalized intimacy with characters that is felt by the author, the narrator, and the reader. By attempting to align readerly, authorial, and narratorial perception, Trollope works to recreate the “objective ground of visual truth” that a classical model of vision supplied (Crary, Techniques 14). Nevertheless, he worries about issues of point of view. Perspectivalism relies on its viewer's attitude in a particular position. That is, in its ideal form, pictorial perspectivalism allows any viewer who inhabits a particular position to see the same objects and to see them in the same way as any other viewer. In this sense, perspectivalism depersonalizes and abstracts the observer because it does not rely on the individuality of any particular observer. Trollope, however, fears that this impersonal model of the observer creates a vacuum that the personality of a particular observer fills. The narrator is the name Trollope gives to the personality that fills the vacuum, which Trollope fears indicates that his novels are subjective and represent only one way of understanding the world. In such a case, the point of view that characterizes his novels is not familiar – as we are accustomed to believe – because it represents the everyday world. Trollope believes that because novels are oriented from the narrator's point of view, the catholicity implied by pictorial perspectivalism is not available to the novel. The presence of a narrator, to Trollope's mind, veers the novel away from the objectivity to which perspectivalism seems a means. As Trollope notes fundamental differences between novelistic and pictorial point of view, we see that he himself did not consider his novels as natural or naturalizing.

Early on in Charles Dickens'sOur Mutual Friend (1865), the pair of characters Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood glibly recount the years they have spent doing nothing, with no business, no efforts, no cares. They have jobs – one is a barrister, the other a solicitor – but neither has done a scrap of work, ever.

There is a curious narrative moment near the middle of George Eliot's novel Silas Marner. Marner, on discovering the theft of his gold, runs to the Rainbow Inn, the village's popular gathering place, intending to broadcast the theft and demand justice. This is a climatic moment in the plot; as readers we turn the page with mounting anticipation: how will the villagers react to the strange weaver's first intrusion into this most sacred of spaces in Raveloe? The reader must immediately be disappointed, then, on turning the page and coming to chapter six. We do go inside the Rainbow Inn but leave Marner on the other side of the yet-unopened door; instead of an exciting confrontation between Marner and the villagers, we are made to listen to a meandering exchange of retold stories by a cast of unimportant characters. This narrative interruption within the novel echoes the much larger interruptions that surround the production and reception of this text. Silas Marner most literally interrupted Eliot's work on Romola. She says in her journal that the idea “thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating” (Journals 87). The novel also disrupts most critical consensus about Eliot as a realist writer. No one seems quite sure what to do with this half fable, half realist work alongside such masterpieces as Middlemarch. In addition, the character of Marner interrupts what we have come to expect from Eliot's characters; whether an earlier hero like Adam Bede or a later heroine like Gwendolen Harleth, her characters have at least some endearing qualities despite, or maybe because of, their flaws. When one turns to Silas Marner, however, a reader can be hard pressed to find anything appealing about the peculiar weaver.