This article reads Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as ambivalent responses to the new conception of human intelligence that emerged from Victorian psychology and evolutionary theory and which formed the basis of what I describe as the Victorian biopolitics of intelligence. Although these novels reflect Hardy's endorsement of the new biological model of intelligence, they also register his resistance to what many late Victorians assumed to be its corollary: that mental worth can be an object of scientific measurement, classification, and ranking. I suggest that the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière illuminates the extent to which these novels challenge the scientific reification of intellectual inequality and attempt to vindicate overlooked and stigmatized forms of intelligence.

In the early 1890s, both John Addington Symonds and Arthur Symons were fascinated by Paul Verlaine's sonnet “Parsifal” (1886)—in particular, by its final line, which dwells on the voices of singing children. Symonds enthused to Symons that it was “a line [to] treasure forever,” while, nevertheless, noting his reservations to Horatio Forbes Brown that “fine as it is, [it] looks like it […] must be rather of the sickly school.” In an article on Verlaine, Symons praised the poem as a “triumph [of] amazing virtuosity,” echoing the sentiments of his friend George Moore, who in Confessions of a Young Man (1886) exclaimed that he “kn[ew] of no more perfect thing than this sonnet.” With its repetition of assonant vowel sounds, Verlaine's closing line captures the gentle rise heavenward of the ethereal voices of Richard Wagner's offstage choristers, resounding above the stage at the conclusion of the opera. The hiatus with which the line opens functions as a sigh of renunciation, as the listeners abandon themselves to the inexpressible force of the transcendent. In Verlaine's sonnet, these children's voices become the epitome of the “disembodied voice” that Symons sees as so characteristic of Decadent poetics. They sing of the delicate immateriality of spiritual experience, the transient fragility of existence.

Filled with caustic statements on artificial plant breeding and florist flowers, John Ruskin's botanical essay collection, Proserpina (1875–86), advances a cogent argument against commercial floriculture and, by extension, the commodification of vegetal life. However, the eco-political stakes of this text have received limited attention. Past studies have primarily interpreted Proserpina as a testament to Ruskin's disquiet about Darwinism and as a memorial to his late love, Rose La Touche. In this article, I argue that beneath these scientific and personal imperatives, Proserpina urges readers to resist the consumption of floral commodities engineered by Victorian nurserymen and florists. My reading draws together the history of nineteenth-century flower breeding with recent inquiries from the field of critical plant studies in order to illuminate how Ruskin's botanical prose dovetails with present-day debates on vegetal ethics. Flower-breeding motifs figure prominently in a series of letters written for Proserpina by Rose's mother, Maria La Touche, whose contributions to this book have long been overlooked. Analyzing Proserpina's floricultural subtext will not only recover La Touche's letters from the shadow of Ruskin's love life but also underscore an unexplored facet of Ruskin's antipathy toward Darwin, who celebrated florist flowers in his own botanical writings.

This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation. If modern ecocriticism has sometimes been hobbled by a restrictively organic, harmonious conception of how ecologies work, we wager that a return to Victorian interrogations of natural and social collectives can furnish more open, less integrated models for how assemblages operate. The nineteenth century saw both the first acceleration of anthropogenic climate change and the birth of a host of sciences-economic, social, geological, energetic, and (yes) ecological-that now struggle to address the planetary implications of that acceleration. Our growing awareness that we are now living in the long tail of this conjuncture and at the birth of the Anthropocene has prompted a re-evaluation of what we think we know about how nature and society work, and how they might work together.

The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey the new understanding of futurity that attended the nineteenth-century rise of an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of underground resources. Focusing on Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Fanny Mayne's Jane Rutherford; Or, the Miners' Strike (1853), this article demonstrates how these works adapt the provincial realist novel's emphasis on social renewal by way of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance to the extraction-based society of industrial Britain, undergirded by a trajectory of depletion and exhaustion rather than renewal. These works' deviation from novelistic chrononormativity expresses a new understanding of an extraction-based present that is claimed at the expense of future generations.

“Affective Transmission and the Invention of Characters in the Victorian Bildungsroman” reconsiders several novels about young women as they make their way into a larger social world. Rather than achieving self-discipline, as has frequently been argued, heroines such as Lucy Snowe, Maggie Tulliver, and Margaret Hale tend to be overpowered by interpersonal emotions. They distance themselves from these affects by attributing them to fictitious characters. The gendered variation of the larger tradition this article sketches out calls into question the premise of the bildungsroman as a whole, raising the possibility that the adjustment of the self to external realities is never as complete as it seems.

For Frances Trollope, the nineteenth century was defined by what she perceives to be a pervasive mechanization of emotional life, a phenomenon similar to what Tamara Ketabgian has recently described as the “industrialization of affect” in this period. At the center of this phenomenon, for Trollope, is the disquieting specter of the mother-machine, a figure in whom the processes of mechanical production and maternal reproduction collide. The figure originates, in Trollope's fiction, in the character Juno, an enslaved woman whose alienation from her children under slavery serves as a major plot point in her groundbreaking 1836 antislavery novel The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scenes on the Mississippi. That figure is then reworked in the violent relationship between children and machines Trollope would go on to depict in her 1839–40 novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, one of the first industrial novels published in Victorian England. In these early fictions, Trollope documents what she perceives to be the mechanization of the maternal body under, alternately, slavery and industrialism, and its consequences for both the work and experience of care under nineteenth-century capitalism in its varied forms.

Critics writing on the poetry of Charlotte Mew have long considered the cri de coeur—often described as an involuntary exclamation of the speaker's, or the poet's, secret suffering—a defining element of Mew's poetics; this focus has contributed to an ongoing critical tendency to read Mew's work as pathologically divided between authentic feeling and artificial performance. Due to Mew's liminal position in literary history—writing from the 1890s through the 1910s—her work is often also read in terms of a struggle between Victorian propriety and modernist innovation. Attending to Mew's own use of the phrase “cri de coeur,” however, shows that she used it not primarily to indicate the expression of deep feeling but as a quotable, extractable catchphrase or tag that might circulate independently from its source text in quite different literary and cultural contexts. Reading Mew's poems “The Farmer's Bride” and “The Fête,” as well as her unpublished short story “Thic Theer Kayser,” with this definition of the cri de coeur in mind reveals a poetics rooted in the lively print and performance cultures of Mew's own lifetime—a flexible, entertaining poetics that challenges conventional understandings of the boundaries of literary periods.

This article traces the rise of modern oil culture to interlocking innovations in British fiction, political economy, natural science, and colonial capitalism. It advances a method called “transitive reading” to understand those innovations and to show how writers first conceived of oil in relation to established energy inputs such as coal. The article then reads Joseph Conrad's late masterpiece, Victory (1915), as an ambivalent artifact of the British petro-imagination. In representing the “liquidation” of overseas coal capitalism, Victory articulates a desire for freedom from carbon power, while nevertheless binding that desire to a world where petroleum or “liquid coal” was becoming increasingly constitutive of the self.

Nathan K. Hensley's recent study, Forms of Empire (2016), posits that liberalism, as the nineteenth century progressed, came up against the “wayward meanings” generated by its own contradictions, particularly the “curious intimacy between legality and harm” that characterized a doctrine of individual freedom inextricably rooted in violent imperial expansion. For Hensley, “the dogged persistence of killing in an age of liberty disrupted the conceptual assumptions of progressive idealism”; while “the very inseparability of law and violence, never more painfully evident than in episodes of colonial war and legal emergency, collapsed the logical principles of non-contradiction and identity that remain our common sense.”

This essay explores how Charles Dickens's representation of history in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his historical novel of the French Revolution, is influenced by the Phantasmagoria. The Phantasmagoria was an optical ghost show popularized in Paris in the 1790s by the showman Etienne Gaspard Robertson. Using a hidden magic lantern in a pitch-dark room, Robertson projected images of ghosts and skeletons as well as historical personages from the French Revolution. Drawing on Dickens's own writings on the Phantasmagoria, the essay argues that Dickens's approach to historical fiction is informed by the Phantasmagoria's medium-specific effects and its cultural association with history and historical memory. Specifically, Dickens's turn to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity to represent historical temporality is influenced by the dialectical visual effects of the Phantasmagoria and related mid-nineteenth-century optical technologies. A Tale of Two Cities has always resisted the dialectical-materialist paradigm for the nineteenth-century historical novel first developed by Georg Lukács and more recently elaborated by Fredric Jameson. By employing a media archaeological framework, this essay offers a revitalized approach to Dickens's historical representation that contextualizes it within nineteenth-century theories and discourses of optical perception.

“We saw no issues,” reports the Department of Homeland Security in a self-study of its practices for detaining children at the US–Mexico border, “except one unsanitary bathroom.” The system is working as it should; all is well. “CBP [Customs and Border Protection] facilities we visited,” the report summarizes, “appeared to be operating in compliance with the 2015 National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention, and Search.” A footnote on page 2 of the September 2018 document defines the prisoners at these facilities, the “unaccompanied alien children,” as “aliens under the age of eighteen with no lawful immigration status in the United States and without a parent or legal guardian in the United States ‘available’ to care and [provide] physical custody for them.” Available is in scare quotes. This tic of punctuation discloses to us that the parents of these children have been arrested and removed. They are not available, and cannot take physical custody of their children, because they themselves are in physical custody. In a further typographical error, the word “provide” has been omitted: the children are without a parent or legal guardian in the United States “available” to care and physical custody for them. The dropped word turns “physical custody” into a verb and sets this new action, to physical custody, in tense relation to “care.”

What does it mean to commit? And why are men stereotypically afraid to do it? At some point in the last, say, sixty years, commitment-phobia displaced sexual neurosis as the acceptable euphemism through which men could talk about (or at least be talked about as though they talked about) the obsessive fear of castration that, from Ovid to Freud, took as its sign the phallophagic vagina. Thus, in one of the key contemporary representations of male commitment-phobia, the relationship between Chandler and Janice on Friends, our sympathetic horror derives not from Chandler's having been encompassed by Janice's body but by her postcoital laugh. To surrender, by surrendering to the feminizing procedure of commitment, one's contempt for women; to put oneself in the position where one had no choice but to put up with such a laugh—worse, perhaps, to feel compelled to excuse such a laugh among one's friends: such would be the anxious hypothesis of a heterosexual body magnetized toward feminization, but just as strongly defended from it.

In Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey (1847), the eponymous narrator uses a range of ecological metaphors to make sense of her interactions with others. She likens governessing to domestic horticulture and envisions how her task of educating children will be “to train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day.” Rather than voice her unfulfilled romantic feelings for Weston or consciously work through her self-doubts about physical appearance, she visualizes them both as insects: she is the “humble glow-worm” who, without a “power of giving light” (i.e., beauty), “the roving fly might pass her . . . a thousand times, and never light beside her” (123). Even the reader, in the opening sentence, assumes the role of active participant: a nucivorous beast hunting for whatever “dry, shriveled kernel” of narrative meaning might be found by “cracking the nut” (5). As character, the budding naturalist “botanize[s] and entomologize[s] along the green banks and budding hedges”; as narrator, she projects herself and those around her into complex ecosystems (95). Her choice of metaphors captures a matrix of exchanges in which species of all kinds interact with one another and their environments in unpredictable ways. Agnes assigns the life cycles of flora and fauna to characters, populating the novel with human and nonhuman animals in ways that draw heavily on early nineteenth-century science even as they also prefigure some of the concerns of contemporary animal studies and ecocriticism.

E. W. Hornung's novel The Camera Fiend (1911) imagines a frighteningly extreme vision of photography. This text leverages an existing discourse about the camera fiend—an amateur photographer who intrudes on strangers to capture snapshots of vulnerable moments. I argue that an examination of Hornung's version of the camera fiend, including its conflation with the representation of the scientist, illuminates the logic of threatening liminality and monstrous synthesis in the relationship between photography and existing social conventions. The text also proposes a solution to these cultural fears by repairing social disruptions, but it does so at a cost that is untenable.

This essay presents an ecocritical analysis of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, the 1850s manuscript novel by a formerly-enslaved African American woman that was recovered by Henry Louis Gates in 2001. Examining Crafts's extensive engagement with Charles Dickens's Bleak House, it argues that Crafts's fictionalized narrative of enslavement and self-emancipation re-imagines a Victorian politics of environmental health as a critique of environmental racism. Showing how Crafts presents the material ecology of the plantation South as a site and vector of violence, it reads The Bondwoman's Narrative as resisting nineteenth-century scientific discourses of racialized immunity that sought to legitimize the systemic neglect of enslaved people in the antebellum United States.

Alfred Tennyson's poem “The Palace of Art” (1832/1842) is liable to strike the modern reader as all too clear in its meanings. Yet the author evidently feels the need to gloss the theme of the work and to elaborately preview its narrative in a brief poem that he includes with the piece when he sends it to his friend Richard Trench. “I send you here a sort of allegory (For you will understand it),” Tennyson writes in a peculiar formulation that muddies several issues about the aspirations of the work even while expressing certainty about the poem's clarity. The suggestion is that Trench will have access to a particular insight (“you will understand” being something we say when others may not). Or does Tennyson mean that the allegory is so clear that its tendency is unmissable? That would certainly be a reasonable construal of the claim about a poem with few apparent mysteries.

To my astonishment, I find myself not “old,” not as we all feel at least for moments during middle age, but really old: eighty-seven-years-plus as I write this piece. It won't be finished until I am eighty-eight! That hard-to-swallow fact is what allows me this rather self-indulgent retrospective on a Victorianist career that has spanned several generations of criticism and scholarship. Perhaps, I dare to think, a look back at the arc of that career might be of interest to someone beside myself, moving as it does from the time—around Christmas 1958, when I began writing on a portable electric typewriter a dissertation on George Eliot and determinism—to this moment, when writing a dissertation on a single author seems rather risky and professionally unhelpful, especially if one tries to do it on a typewriter.

This essay reads Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry for its “ecological perception”: a perceptual modality involving the dynamic interaction between human bodies and environmental givens or potentialities. Linking Hopkins's syncretic ideas about perception to the psychologist J. J. Gibson's account of our sensitivity to environmental “affordances,” the essay assesses three scales of ecological perception in Hopkins (arboreal, atmospheric, apocalyptic) and stresses the particular relevance of the intermediate (atmospheric) scale for our experience of environmental crisis. In “The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe,” Hopkins recognizes the “teleconnections” bridging global systems and specific sites without remaining rooted to the local or bioregional (arboreal) or rushing to a vantage beyond planetary confines (apocalyptic).

In the fall of 2017, a year into the current U.S. administration, a month into the #MeToo movement, I reread Adorno's 1962 essay “Commitment,” on the creation and consumption of art in an authoritarian world. I reread it at the same time that I became brave enough, and angry enough, to teach Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) for the first time in my fifteen-year career. Adorno says that Sartre's question, “‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’ is also the question whether any art now has the right to exist” in the wake of atrocities like the Holocaust. Adorno ultimately resolves the question in the affirmative, but only at the end of an essay otherwise dedicated to the difficulties of producing literature that resists a consumerist regime. For Adorno, committed literature (that is, progressive, instrumentalized, messaged) all too often assimilates itself to the brutalities against which it protests, while autonomous literature (that is, art that exists for itself) runs the risk of degenerating into a “fetish . . . an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political” (177). In returning to both Tess and Adorno after a longish absence, I wondered whether, in spite of Adorno's overtly modernist leanings, we might nevertheless consider that certain Victorian novels manifest his concept of tensed oscillation between commitment and autonomy. Adorno suggests that certain nonrealist art forms (one of his examples is Picasso's Guernica) neither “do” nor attempt to compel others to “do” anything instrumental, and yet such works simultaneously both illuminate and (precisely in their turning away from action) condemn systemic brutalities. We need not entirely agree with Adorno's reading of Guernica specifically, nor his fetish-treatment of modernist art broadly, to entertain the idea that—even in their realist projects—certain Victorian novels also “negate empirical reality, [and] by merely existing endlessly reiterat[e systemic] guilt” (190). I'll return to this question more directly later in the essay; for now, let it lurk in the corners of my discussion of Tess.