In the nineteenth century Britain underwent a period of immense religious doubt and spiritual instability, prompted in part by German biblical criticism, the development of advanced geological and evolutionary ideas forwarded by men such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, and the crisis in faith demonstrated by many high profile Church members, particularly John Henry Newman's conversion to Catholicism in 1845. In tracing the development of this religious disbelief, historian Owen Chadwick comments that “mid-Victorian England asked itself the question, for the first time in popular understanding, is Christian faith true?” (Victorian Church: Part I 1). Noting the impact of the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and the multi-authored collection Essays and Reviews in 1860, Chadwick further posits that “part of the traditional teaching of the Christian churches was being proved, little by little, to be untrue” (Victorian Church: Part I 88). As the theological debate over the truth of the Bible intensified so did the question of how to reach, preach, and convert the urbanized and empowered working and middle classes. Indicative of this debate was the immense popularity of the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, who was commonly referred to as the “Prince of Preachers.” Spurgeon exploded onto the religious scene in the mid-1850s and his theatrical and expressive form of oratory polarized mid-Victorian society as to the proper, most effective mode of preaching. In print culture, the emergence of the religious periodical Good Words, with its unique fusion of spiritual and secular material contributed by authors from an array of denominations, demonstrated a concurrent re-evaluation within the religious press of the evolving methods of disseminating religious discourse. The 1864 serialization of Ellen Wood's Oswald Cray in Good Words emphasizes the magazine's interest in combining and synthesizing religious and popular material as a means of revitalizing interest in religious sentiment. In 1860 Wood's novel East Lynne was critically categorized as one of the first sensation novels of the 1860s, a decade in which “sensational” became the modifier of the age. Wood, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was subsequently referred to as one of the original creators of sensation fiction, a genre frequently denigrated as scandalous and immoral. Oswald Cray, however, sits snugly among the sermons, parables, and social mission essays that fill the pages of Good Words.

In 1872, Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré began publishing their lavish travelogue, London, a Pilgrimage. Much renowned for his illustrations of Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Idylls of the King, and other significant literary texts, Doré's considerable reputation as an artist fetched him a staggering sum of ten thousand pounds as payment for his work in London, a Pilgrimage. Jerrold, responsible for conceptualizing the project, was an established liberal playwright and journalist, often contributing pieces to the Daily News, Illustrated London News, and Athenaeum. Looking for interesting material, Jerrold and Doré traveled all over London; Doré often made notes on the spot and finished the illustrations later. Seeking to situate their work within the field of social exploration, Jerrold and Doré referenced Henry Mayhew's reformist journalistic series, London Labour and the London Poor. Jerrold claimed that their social investigation would reproduce for contemporary readers Mayhew's categories of “those who work, those who cannot, [and] those who won't work” (“Frontmatter”). Volumes of London, a Pilgrimage, however, were reviewed as gift-books in various periodicals; the Examiner, for example, reviewed it in the “Christmas-Books” section, indicating that these volumes, which contained pictures of lower-class shanties and miserable, under-fed people, were being gifted and enjoyed (“Christmas-Books”).

This essay looks at how the question of late-Victorian imperial decline is contested, formulated, and framed within Guy Boothby's A Prince of Swindlers – a popular, yet critically-overlooked, collection of detective stories set in Calcutta and London, that appeared in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. There is, of course, a familiar critical narrative about the Victorian fin de siècle that characterises the era as a particularly fraught period “of mounting complexity and contradiction” with regard to empire (Dixon 2). The Berlin Conference of 1885, the failure of British Troops at the Siege of Khartoum, the so-called scramble for Africa, the undermining of Britain's steel manufacturing superiority by German and American competition, and the decline of the Royal Navy relative to the navies of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy all underscored the fragility of British imperial dominion. As Patrick Brantlinger puts it, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230).

Impelled to seek relief from a “peccant chest” (L233) at the seaside, Christina Rossetti travelled to Hastings in December 1864, taking a carefully wrapped bundle of unfinished manuscript poetry with her. Throughout the winter until the following March, a series of letters to Cheyne Walk kept her brother Dante Gabriel abreast not only of her gradual recovery, but also of her efforts to complete her second book of poetry, two years after she had made a successful debut with Goblin Market. Shortly after her arrival, Rossetti reported that she was struggling to finish “The Prince's Progress,” the long narrative poem that was to lend its title to the new volume:

After Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the New Statesman in 1913, one of their inaugural projects was a series of short articles entitled “What is Socialism?,” which ran from April through September of that year. A telling example of their attempts to frame the debate occurs in installment twelve, in which they liken choosing equality as a social ideal with “teach[ing] ourselves to be gentlemen” and instituting a new “national standard of good manners” (364). They struck a similar note in The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (1923), condemning capitalist competition as inherently vulgar (36) and tracing “the democratic conception of good manners” to those “strata of society where a practical equality of material circumstances happens to prevail, and social position depends” upon circumstances other than wealth (40). This seemingly anomalous mix of socialism and the behavioral conventions of gentility signals a broader rhetorical strategy employed by the Webbs and other Fabian spokesmen to promote their political brand from the 1880s on.

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) wrote his most popular supernatural tales between 1890 and 1900, a period in which European culture felt itself to be on the decline and in which “decadent” art and literature rose up both as a reflection of and a contribution to this perceived cultural deterioration. While Machen's works have received little critical attention, a recent revival of interest in fin-de-siècle decadence has brought his supernatural tales into the literary limelight. Noteworthy examples of this interest include Julian North's treatment of The Great God Pan in Michael St. John's Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture and Christine Ferguson's analysis of the same work in her PMLA article “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment.” Indeed, Machen's supernatural tales could enhance and complicate any exposition of decadent literature and culture; they offer a unique vision of descent into the primordial that differs from the moral and psychological treatment of decadence in other popular works of the time, such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like Stevenson and Wilde, Machen employs themes of transgression and metamorphosis to illustrate his characters’ deviations from human nature. However, the forces at work in Machen's tales do not arise from the recesses of the human mind in its modern conception, nor do his protagonists sin primarily against society and the arbitrary nature of its morals and values. Instead, Machen locates mythic forces at work within his contemporary society to highlight a much older form of transgression and to challenge notions of degeneration that held currency at the end of the nineteenth century.

In chapter 8 of Dorian Gray, Dorian reflects on the terrifying discovery, which he has made the previous night, that the painting has been somehow altered to express his own moral state. He speculates thus on a possible explanation for the change in the picture:

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:

Thomas Hardy noted regretfully: “Few literary critics discern the solidarity of all the arts” (Florence Hardy 300). An architect self-educated in art history by visits to London museums, an avid reader of John Ruskin, keenly alive to music and responsive to the ornamental sculpture and painting of Gothic buildings, Hardy believed in a composite muse. After ceasing to write novels, in which he had included numerous painterly allusions and references to specific art works, he overtly probed the image/text relation in his 1898 debut volume of poetry: Wessex Poems and Other Verses, by Thomas Hardy, with 30 Illustrations by the Author. Although a reading experience dependent upon the original aesthetic interplay that Hardy had designed was destroyed in most subsequent printings, the first edition's partnership of image and text remains absolutely central to the book's multiple meanings. Indeed, Hardy's images and words should be regarded as inseparable, since they interact in what W. J. T. Mitchell has called a “composite art form” (83, 89).

The questions that The Ring and Book (1868–69) raises regarding truth, perception, and testimony have long concerned critics. However, few critics have given particular focus to the role that memory plays in the poem. While The Ring and the Book was not the first piece of literature to offer different narrations of the same event, Robert Browning's introduction of at least ten iterations or perspectives (depending on how you count) of the same narrative within one work remains unique. The legal system is very much in view throughout the text of the poem, and so the nature of testimony as a component of the legal process is integral to our consideration of The Ring and the Book. Specifically, shifting attitudes about legal testimony in the nineteenth century make memory particularly important for any study of testimony in the poem. In his multivolume work The Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827), Jeremy Bentham gives special consideration to the composition of testimony, which he argues consists of four elements: perception, judgment, memory, and expression (155). Bentham's work recognized that testimony was not a simple matter of truth and falsehood, but that the faculties of the witness were intimately intertwined with testimony. However, contemporary critics have tended to focus on perception and expression (language), while memory has remained mostly unexamined.

In the anonymous “The Charter and the Land” (1847), a story about the Chartist Land Co-operative Society, William Wright's drunkard's path is remarkably short and his subsequent journey to teetotalism is astonishingly easy. Displaced in urban London and without sustainable work, Wright slowly and somewhat predictably takes to the bottle. The lack of detail the author gives regarding Wright's waywardness suggests that the narrative was common enough to be truncated. Unemployment, poverty, and forced idleness receive a good deal more attention than the ensuing moral downfall. Still, Wright's wife grows increasingly worried as the small amount of money she brings home is cruelly taken from her and spent by her husband in the alehouse, and not on food for the children. After witnessing familial conflicts over spending, readers familiar with the drunkard trope might expect spousal abuse, crime, and death. But one day, out of the blue, Wright says he has for weeks given up drink, instead using the family money to purchase lottery tickets for a stake in the Land Co-operative Society, what was to become the National Land Company in 1846. Feargus O'Connor founded the Company in 1845 in part to allow urban working classes to return to a more rural and stable way of life and in part to create working-class landowners who could subsequently qualify for the franchise. Wright wins a few acres of land outside of London and though the work promises to be challenging, he is happy to have it. The Wright family settles happily in their new home and has nothing but the possibility of more unmitigated happiness to celebrate. Pleasing his wife to no end, Wright promises total abstinence and the story comes to an abrupt conclusion.

Robert Louis Stevenson took it for granted that Rome had shaped most of the Western modern world: “the average man at home . . . is sunk over the ears in Roman civilisation,” he wrote in a letter to H. B. Baildon (Mehew 474). Unlike the English contemporaries of his own class, he had not been steeped in classical literature, nor had he “internalised Latin literature in the way he ascribed to his English character Robert Herrick . . . in The Ebb-Tide” – mostly because his poor health had precluded regular school attendance (Jolly, Stevenson in the Pacific 37). But he did come to the classics, “from the outside” as Roslyn Jolly demonstrates, through his legal studies: “Rome counted to him as something very much more than a literature – a whole system of law and empire” that had laid the foundations of most Western societies.

When Charles Dickens tried to lobby for American support of an international copyright agreement during his wildly popular 1842 tour of the United States, the English author was famously shocked to find himself lambasted as an elitist who dared expect payment for what Americans believed they had the right to read for free (McGill 109–40; Claybaugh 71; Pettitt 152). Dickens encountered in the practice of literary piracy, or what was called in the United States, the culture of reprinting, a deep fissure in capitalist democratic culture between individual ownership and public access, an ideological divide that forms the backdrop for the creation and circulation of nineteenth-century print. If the legal privatization of intellectual property hovered in the imagination of so many Victorian writers, it formed the happy ending of a long nineteenth-century struggle over literary piracy, a contention of goods that shaped the Victorian stage as we well as the transatlantic literary marketplace.

As Jan Assmann writes, the concept of “cultural memory” both “draws our attention to the role of the past in constituting our world” and also investigates “the motives that prompt our recourse to it” (ix). Cultural memory is transmitted through a variety of mediators ranging from texts and images to commemorative sites, whose complex aesthetic and ideological configurations – whether associated with trauma or glory – are a source of great interest. In his New Science (1725–44), Giambattista Vico claimed that “humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando” (8), highlighting the importance burial rituals had in the creation of civilised society. The commemoration of the dead is indeed at the core of cultural memory as the foundation on which the social compact between the living and the dead rests.

Art for the Nation: Sir Charles Eastlake at the National Gallery

HILARY FRASER

Apocalypse Then and Now

LYNDA NEAD

Exhibiting Dickens at 200

ANNE HUMPHERYS

Over the past few decades, intellectual historians and political theorists have begun to uncover the immense influence Auguste Comte's Positivist ideology exerted on Victorian culture, which attracted sympathisers such as John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Beatrice Webb, and William Morris (Bevir 57; Varouxakis 100–18; Wright 135, 175–220). Until recently, scholars believed that, within Comte's prolific society of British followers, Vernon Lushington was merely a sympathiser of the movement's aesthetic and literary culture. While many will appreciate that recent accounts of Lushington's life have revealed that he was a “complete” Positivist, or adherent to the Religion of Humanity, few have had an opportunity to examine his position in relation to Comte's prototype for civic reconstruction (Taylor 339–40; Vogeler 163–69). In his four-volume System of Positive Polity (1848–1854), Comte referred to this scheme for pan-European peace as the “Republic of the West.” The extent to which Lushington's work may be read as disseminating this republican city-state system as an inevitable, if not realisable, edifice has remained less clear than others within the circles of British Positivism.