Focusing on East Lynne (1860–61) and Lord Oakburn's Daughters (1864) and referring to Victorian advice manuals for pregnant women, this article argues that Ellen Wood centered pregnancy and childbirth as critical experiences of women's lives. In East Lynne, Isabel gives birth to her first child in a difficult labor that nearly kills her; her future adultery originates in the lying-in room; and the final section heightens Isabel's torture as she witnesses Barbara's second pregnancy. Lord Oakburn's Daughters reuses elements of East Lynne while intensifying its focus on pregnancy, postpartum vulnerability, and lying in. The novel opens with an explicit childbirth scene; its murder plot is set in the lying-in room; and its central metonym, a locket, stands for women's bonds established during childbirth. While pregnancy and childbirth are thought to have remained largely unrepresented in Victorian fiction, both novels use contemporary vocabulary and codes to represent these experiences. Moreover, Wood created her particular brand of gestational sensation by featuring women in white as figures of maternal loss, longing, and postpartum trauma. Studying these novels thus not only provides evidence of how Wood represented pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal feeling but also models a narratological method for analyzing such representations in mid-Victorian fiction generally.

This article explores the narrative functions of domestic accidents in Victorian fiction. Taking Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House (1873) as a case study, it critically parses how popular fiction engaged with competing explanations of how or why accidents occur. As a new understanding of chance, risk, and statistical likelihood in the nineteenth century began to reshape the representation of accidents, narratives navigated shifting concepts of personal misfortune, of providence and poetic justice, as well as of probability. In Yonge's novel, domestic accidents demonstrate risk-management at home, promoting a concept that complicates narrative expectations both of divine punishment and of conventional conversion patterns.

The nineteenth century is the period when so many of the infrastructures on which we rely for the transmission and distribution of ideas, people, and goods were, on one hand, established and standardized and, on the other, contested and transformed in practice. We argue that literary and cultural scholars of the nineteenth century can make major contributions to the transhistorical and transimperial work of critical infrastructure studies. The pieces in this special issue give us a picture of Victorian infrastructure that we have loosely organized into four major themes: Water and Waste; Death and Bodies; Periods and Punctuation; and Care and Aid. Whether close-reading literary representations of infrastructure or close-reading literature as infrastructure, these essays collectively show how Victorian literature moved people. Our contributors address the following questions, among others: How did the material structures that moved people, goods, and ideas make people feel? How did people's feelings, libidinal energies, and practices affect how infrastructures were imagined, designed, built, used, and transformed—in literature and in the world?

Vernacular Victoria: The Queen in the Languages of South Asia began life as an international online colloquium hosted by the Department of English at Ashoka University, Haryana, in collaboration with the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad (India). Participants were invited to give papers based on an archive of vernacular eulogies, addresses, memorials, and biographies collected by Miles Taylor during the course of research for his book Empress: Queen Victoria and India (Yale University Press, 2018). Following the colloquium of April 26–27, 2021, further commissions were undertaken as the editors broadened the scope of the project.

This essay argues that Edwin Abbott's 1884 science fiction novel, Flatland, engages Victorian theological debates about the dimensionality of spiritual beings to reexamine the epistemological relationship between readers and literary characters. Liberal theologians at the fin de siècle turned to mathematical models of higher dimensions to reconcile the existence of immaterial spirits with a rational framework. Abbott's novel, set in a ghostly plane world populated only by polygons, imagines characters as analogous to spiritual forms in both their immateriality and their resistance to empirical modes of perception. Yet where theologians turned to higher dimensions to render immaterial entities scientifically knowable, Flatland uses its protagonist's higher-dimensional explorations to defamiliarize realism's techniques for making characters knowable—specifically, its spatialization of characters as beings with an accessible, dimensional interiority that grants readers a feeling of omniscience. Dismissing this omniscient relation to character as a posture that invites a dangerous epistemological complacency, Flatland uses its dimensional conceit to dramatize instead the strenuous imaginative work a reader must perform to temporarily inhabit a character's limited perspective—work that Abbott conceives as uniquely theological. For Abbott, theology thus acts not as a discourse of certainty and doctrinal closure but rather as a vital imaginative resource for rethinking fictional form.

The collected essays in this “Vernacular Victoria” issue explore representations of Queen Victoria in Indian languages. They study how complex practices of loyalty to monarchical forms of authority enabled Indians to create and inhabit their diverse lifeworlds. They analyze how the uneven socialization of print and the complex cultures of literary production in colonial India shaped articulations of loyalty. “Vernacular Victoria” is about histories of Indian aspirations and negotiations, celebrations and disappointments. Victoria enables this special issue to contribute to a more global understanding of the field known as Victorian studies.

In this essay I read debates about amenities of water and waste in the British Caribbean in the late and immediate post-Victorian period through histories of intimacy and kinship centered in fiction by Caribbean writers of the last twenty years. In these novels and short stories, collecting water at a stream or a standpipe or emptying a chamber pot are actions that produce or recall moments of desire and aspiration, shame and punishment, in storylines that move between a past of enslavement and indentureship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a present of political and psychological stasis or upheaval in the 1950s, 1970s, or the early twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discussions about fire hydrants or standpipes index a British Caribbean colony's evolving landscape of modernization and the disagreements about what shape and speed this process should take, and recent fiction allows us to discern how these amenities inherit and bequeath associations of trauma.

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.

Municipal solid waste management shapes public life at every moment, and it did so for the Victorians as much as it does for us today. Victorians were concerned about the sanitary risk unruly trash posed, but profit, not conservation or fear of hazardous waste, was the primary motivator behind all Victorian municipal waste management. Though the Victorian period is often characterized as a time when government and public works were becoming centralized, this was not the case with municipal solid waste management. Instead, a focus on the individual pursuit of profit meant that Victorian waste management was dispersed across society, with homemakers, recycling entrepreneurs, dustmen, and the very poorest members of society all playing a role. The structures Victorians built (or failed to build) to attend to their trash can help us understand how they ordered society. Waste management practices provide a microcosm of nineteenth-century British capitalism, class, gender roles, and imperial nationalism.

To mark Queen Victoria's jubilee celebrations, many Indian authors composed laudatory literature and music in their vernacular languages. Although these works were often dismissed as “enthusiastic effusions” from poets of dubious ability, they offer intricate examples of the varied meanings the queen's presence had for Indian writers. They illustrate the subtle manipulation of laudatory verse for purposes other than praise; and they frequently offer instances of sophisticated, multilingual intertextuality and reuses of literary traditions of praise (and subversion) in India's precolonial past. This article examines examples of Persianate laudatory writing produced by three Parsi writers in colonial India and demonstrates how these works performed “loyalty” in contested, ambivalent ways.

This paper explores the genre of the botanical gothic, a derivative of the fin de siècle adventure novel in which (generally male) British explorers engage in combat with fictitious killer vegetation from the colonial periphery. I argue that the carnivorous plant of the botanical gothic is intimately entangled with another “man-eating” figure: that of the New Woman. Through a reading of H. G. Wells's “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), Algernon Blackwood's “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912), and Beatrice Grimshaw's “The Tale of the Scarlet Butterflies” (1908), I demonstrate the extent to which the monstrous plant is implicitly gendered as threateningly female and depicted as a sort of exoticized vegetal femme fatale that lures weak-minded men to their demise. This, I argue, builds upon contemporaneous anxieties surrounding feminine sexual independence and the destabilization of gender roles in order to create an excessively sensualized feminine plant “rival” to supplant—and indeed queer—the normatively gendered dynamic of the local, domestic space. Male subjects in such narratives are emasculated under the threateningly penetrative agencies of the carnivorous plant that becomes a vegetal stand-in, I suggest, for the deviant and “man-eating” sexuality attributed to the New Woman figure herself.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) offers the reader fantastical versions of two seemingly realistic office technologies: shorthand writing and polyglot dictionaries. In both cases, Stoker’s changes allow the reader to see varieties of spoken language in ways that the real technologies would not have allowed. Representing dialect through shorthand, as Mina Harker does, would have been impossible with Pitman shorthand as well as antithetical to the principles behind that writing system. And no books existed that could have enabled the translations that Jonathan Harker claims to make with his polyglot dictionary. However, Stoker uses standard English spelling when representing characters of higher status, such as Van Helsing, Morris, and Dracula, all of whom represent national types that were routinely marked by dialect respelling in other fictions of Stoker’s time. The novel therefore exhibits two contrary tendencies: Stoker uses nonstandard spelling when he could easily have avoided it, and he avoids it when he could easily have used it. We place that contradiction in Victorian debates about spelling reform and language purity. We argue that the novel uses standard spelling to reinforce an alliance of Anglo-Teutonic elites, whereas the heteroglossia and polyglossia of these language technologies undermine that trajectory.

This article argues that natural environments should be seen as life-sustaining infrastructures. Countering a tendency to see infrastructures as human-engineered, I show how environmental infrastructures are shaped by humans and nonhumans alike, with their life-sustaining roles often only revealed by their disruption. I demonstrate how infrastructures might be shaped by nonhumans by highlighting the career of Elodea canadensis, or Canadian waterweed, an introduced plant that wrought havoc on Britain's watery environments in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Red weed, the plant introduced by the Martians in H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, echoes Elodea in its course through the British environment. But while Elodea and similar introduced species prompted nascent critiques of imperial plant movement, I show how Wells avoids such critiques by deleting red weed, and any further environmental consequences following from its introduction, from his novel's end. Instead, Wells endorses a natural-selection-driven explanation for the British environment's superior fitness—an explanation that affirms rather than critiques ecological imperialism and mitigates the role of nonhumans in reshaping environmental infrastructures.

This essay examines two travel narratives written by Hardevi, a woman from Lahore who traveled to London for Queen Victoria's jubilee in 1887. The accounts contain Hardevi's narration of her journey by ship and describe the celebrations. Hardevi showcases the queen's marital home and her conjugal life, seamlessly accommodating them within reformist constructions of a modern, educated, pativrata (conjugally virtuous) Indian woman. Hardevi's encounter with the queen at the heart of the empire opens up a conceptual space of possibilities for a modern, gendered self. This article examines her deployment of a mode of subjectivity that allows her to be, simultaneously, an obedient and fascinated colonial subject of the imperial spectacle and also a citizen-subject who claims the agency of critique.

The unprecedented popularity of Charles Dickens's first serial novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37), among all classes of readers helped shape Britain's mass reading public. The irrevocable change that Dickens effected on Victorian print culture is well established, but there is little discussion of how his early works interpreted the print culture in which they first circulated. I approach Pickwick according to the perspective of a little-known contemporary response, “Sam Weller's Scrap Sheet (1837),” printed by John Cleave. “Sam Weller's Scrap Sheet” cleverly reproduces the narrative, form, and material of Pickwick according to the perspective of a laboring-class reader. Its attention to print material and class identity informs a new reading of Pickwick: in order to unify disparate reading and writing cultures, I argue, Pickwick fictively binds together materials sourced from a variety of print cultures and redefines them unanimously as “paper.” As the “Scrap Sheet” makes clear, this effaces the productive agency of the “papers’” originating contexts. Tying together discussions from Pickwick’s reception history, print history, and media studies, this paper more broadly examines the tensions that accompanied shifting relationships to material print in early-industrial England.

This essay argues that Leslie Marmon Silko's 1999 historical-fiction novel Gardens in the Dunes enables Indigenous-centered interventions into Victorian studies, ecocriticism, and their intersection. Dramatizing an animistic Native American view of nature as agentic and enspirited, Silko's novel critiques Victorian plant hunting as rooted in settler-colonial logic that treats nature as inert. In turn, through representations of late Victorian gardeners, Silko suggests that British horticulture was also informed by colonial and capitalist ways of thinking about plants. At the same time, however, the novel locates an animistic strain running through Victorian gardening discourses, which I demonstrate through readings of Victorian garden books depicting plants as agentic and enspirited. Silko, I argue, invites us to revisit the late nineteenth century as characterized by a cultural revival of animistic thought, even as this period also saw the racist stigmatization of animism in the field of Victorian anthropology. I connect this fraught discursive moment in British history to an inherited hesitation toward animism in contemporary Victorian studies and ecocriticism, a hesitation that has contributed to uneven engagement with Indigenous thought in both fields. In response, this essay explicates and emulates Silko's critical methodology for an undisciplining engagement with animism in white-authored, ecocritical Victorian studies.

The political geography of empire transformed with the Victorian rise of steam power and its infrastructure, especially with the emerging dominance of steam as the primary means of transoceanic travel and shipping. Oceanic infrastructure was a new feature of the British Empire especially in the period after 1860, when steamships were increasingly replacing sailing ships and when the material exigencies of fueling and refueling required the installation of coaling stations to support long-haul transport for steam-powered ships. In this essay we explore how these changes registered in literature and discourse, with Joseph Conrad as our prime example. We analyze two of Conrad's works that feature coaling stations and steam-carrying, Victory (1915) and The Mirror of the Sea (1906). Drawing on infrastructure studies, critical ocean studies, and the energy humanities, we make a case for more attention to oceangoing coal as part of a broader reconsideration of empire in the Anthropocene. We also make a case for Conrad as one of the great observers of environmental-infrastructural change in the early fossil-fuel era, worth revisiting now as both witness and interpreter.

In the epilogue to Serial Forms, Clare Pettitt identifies key elements of the “form” she investigates in her massively detailed, deeply original study:

Population was a socially significant yet politically precarious concept in nineteenth-century Britain. In order to highlight the affective implications of “population,” this essay examines Harriet Martineau's fiction in the context of early Victorian concerns over population growth and contemporary thoughts of political economy. As an avid supporter of Thomas Malthus, Martineau maintains that “proportionate labor” is the determining factor in national stability, but her use of sentimental fiction in Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) reveals aspects of the population crisis that are not accounted for by the classic political economists. Martineau's fiction presents population as a phenomenon collectively felt among Victorians rather than as an objective number that represents sociological truth. In her modification of the Malthusian principles to encompass affective negotiations that extend beyond individual morals, Martineau emphasizes the importance of somatic experience in shaping the nineteenth-century understanding of population. Furthermore, as Martineau's narrative resolution to the population crisis comes from well-managed emigration, her works demonstrate that geographical colonial expansion operated as an essential condition in establishing a nationally sustainable idea of population. Reassessing Martineau's literary and historical significance as an innovative successor of Malthus unveils a sophisticated Victorian nexus of population theory and the collective feelings of empire.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, music significantly occupied the cultural and social life of the Bengali people. As the epicenter of British political and economic influence in the subcontinent, Calcutta witnessed the emergence of schools offering instruction in Indian and Western art music. The flourishing city housed private and public printing presses, which ensured the circulation and distribution of large numbers of songbooks, manuals, and theoretical treatises on music. The city was also home to a diverse assortment of hereditary music practitioners and occupational specialists illustrative of a variety of musical traditions spread across Bengal and North India. Around the 1870s, Bengali musicians, patrons, and connoisseurs began to take up music as an intellectual activity, examine its history as a source for social and political substance, and view musical instruments as material objects for disciplinary study. This emerging interest in musicology, broadly conceived, coincided with the proclamation of Victoria as queen and empress of India, considerably transforming Bengal's political fabric and cultural worldview. The pioneering musicologist Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840–1914) was among the many authors who published works celebrating Queen Victoria's ascension as empress of India. In this article, I examine Tagore's songbooks dedicated to the queen, reading them as cultural artifacts representing a richly nuanced historical and musical legacy: a textual and aural archive demonstrating how Bengali musicians used sound to mediate the effects of colonization.