In late nineteenth-century Telugu desa, “Victoria” was more than the name of the queen of Great Britain. It was, in Homi Bhabha's famous formulation, a “sign taken for wonder” the signification of which, however, remained ambivalent. As soon as she was proclaimed the empress of India, the queen's name acquired emblematic connotations that were exploited in both reform and counterreform discourses. Treating Queen Victoria not as a person but as a personification, the present essay reads some of the fetishized signs of the queen in the spatial, print, and literary cultures and notes how the colonial engines of modernity were appropriated, provincialized, and subverted in the domestic sphere.

Logistics is the science and art of moving goods, people, and information efficiently to maximize profit; though it has become synonymous with the rise of the shipping container, its history is as old as trade itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ancient human action of loading and shipping boxes became part of a globalizing network of refrigerated supply chains and transoceanic shipping. Appearing briefly as a detail in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897), the “cold chain” nonetheless orchestrates the plot and governs the vampiric mythology. This temperature-cooled supply and distribution network imbued the times, spaces, and aesthetics of human life with the new capability to ship perishable food, or in the novel's metaphor, “un-death.”

The acquisition of nonnative flora and fauna was long framed by horticultural historians as the result of great British derring-do and hand-to-hand conflict. Yet nineteenth-century plant extraction actually involved comparatively few feats of physical bravery or scenes of Boys’ Own high drama. The letters of Victorian commercial plant-hunters reveal that the removal and exportation of plants entailed the deployment of emerging colonial and national infrastructures together with complex regional and local networks and knowledge systems. Much of a plant-hunter's day-to-day life, tellingly, involved paperwork: submitting drafts and bills of exchange, sending letters and cables to employers, and completing bills of lading to ship plants, in stages, to Europe, where they were received at customs houses before journeying on, by rail and by road, to nurseries, collectors, and auction houses. At the same time, emerging colonial infrastructures only took hunters so far; local and traditional knowledge systems were essential as well. Plant-hunting depended upon the support, expertise, knowledge, and traditions of local people—a fact the enduring narrative of hand-to-hand conflict and triumphant British vanquishing seems structured carefully to conceal.

This article argues that Queen Victoria's Proclamation of 1858, marking the transfer of power from the East India Company to the crown, ushered in a new era of colonial secularity. “Colonial secularity” refers to the myriad ways that normative distinctions between religion and not-religion emerged and proliferated in colonial contexts. The proclamation committed not to interfere in religion, but “religion” is circumscribed, reconceptualized largely as a matter of private conscience set against the purview of the state. As this article explores, it is according to this logic that the abolition of Islamic criminal law after the proclamation could register as noninterference in native religion. At the same time, Christian missionaries contested the proclamation's notions of neutrality to carve out a space in which they might operate.

In its dynamism and shared imaginative scope, popular fiction could provide a creative foundation for “not-yet-achieved” infrastructural projects. By insisting on the moral value of seeing others as “fellow-passengers to the grave,” Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) anticipates the London Necropolis Railway. Designed to relieve pressure on the capital, this purpose-built funeral railroad and cemetery opened in Brookwood, Surrey, in 1854. Through a fantasy that invokes locomotive hearses, Dickens humanizes the notion of a steam-powered funeral apparatus. He advocates for burial beyond the city by contrasting Tiny Tim's restful end in a “green place” with Scrooge's horrifying, “walled-in,” urban grave. Dickens's enduring Christmas story appeals to what could be and eases the imaginative leap required of those entrusting their loved ones to a novel postmortem infrastructure that was built to last.

This essay examines an 1877 Gujarati translation of Queen Victoria's Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. It was the work of M. M. Bhownaggree, later a British MP. The essay explores the circumstances under which Bhownaggree undertook the translation, its content, and its intended audience. It closes with some observations on the book's place in the history of Indian royalism, the place of Indian royalism in the development of modern Gujarati literature, and the interplay of the Gujarati identity that was emerging in the latter part of the nineteenth century with both royalism and Indian nationalism.

This essay studies the formation of a political language of rajabhakti or monarchical loyalty in the Odia-language print sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century. This language revolved around the key terms of Providence, market rationalism, and character. The article traces the provincial careers of these crucial Victorian terms and explores their entanglement with local histories and discourses in the colony. It shows how the language of monarchical loyalty enabled provincial Victorians to construct and inhabit their everyday lifeworlds in the empire.

This essay traces a disjointed aesthetics of hereditary units in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) and Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai's So Long, My Son (2019) and argues that shared social and economic conditions of Victorian Britain and postsocialist China prompt similar ruptures of social realism's totalizing aspirations. The novel and the film are mutually concerned with tragedies of biopolitical management and doomed lineages, but at the same time they both employ an aesthetics of leapings and projections—also featured in Hardy's 1917 poem “Heredity”—that argues for the value of an individual life based on a radical divestment from personhood itself, in favor of the gene's mindless jumps through unmapped space and time.

This essay argues that infrastructures in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) effect temporal accelerations and protractions, as opposed to being connective tissues for spatial and social networks. Reading the law enacted at the court of Chancery and the British Empire's maritime networks, two instances of the novel's many infrastructures, this paper traces infrastructures’ time warps: perpetual deferrals of justice, denials of coevalness to colonial subjects, and accelerations of death for Richard Carstone and other characters. Infrastructures’ temporal transformations reveal how temporalities of varying rhythms are held together under a veneer of uniform linearity by the realist novel's generic attributes like serialized publication and Esther's marriage plot. Attention to this fraught temporality, the author argues, enables readers to glean the extent to which the claims of colonized and subaltern subjects suffuse the novel's narrative voice.

The death of Queen Victoria occasioned the publication of commemorative narratives in early twentieth-century Odisha. They serve as site for understanding how feminine authority was imagined as the Odia literati engaged in a fraught movement for the formation of a separate province of Odisha. They imagined an Odia motherland in relation to figures of maternal authority such as mother India and mother Victoria. This article explores this vernacular representation of the queen as mother in the work of the poet Madhusudan Rao. By drawing on traditions of lament and maternal authority, the article illustrates how Rao used lament to carve out a palimpsest of multiple identities, from imperial subjecthood to regional belonging.

This article surveys works from Kerala related to Queen Victoria and situates M. R. Madhava Warrier's (1893–1952) biography, Victoria Maharani (1931), against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Travancore. It draws on threads related to the position of women on the Malabar coast, the actions of the maharani regent at the time, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi (r. 1924–31), and the political and social climate at the time of her reign. It also considers the relationship between the qualities of Queen Victoria praised in Victoria Maharani, reforms instituted by Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, and the reputation of both in Travancore.

In the Victorian era, innovations in infrastructure, notably the revolutionary stagecoach, redefined women's travel experiences and offered them a means to break free from domesticity. While the rapid pace of the stagecoach initially unsettles individuals like Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), she accustoms herself to its motion to evade perilous situations. Bearing in mind the cadence of the stagecoach, I suggest that Patricia Park's modern retelling of Jane Eyre, Re Jane (2015), adapts the rhythm of the coach by recasting it as the motion of the New York City subway. Revising in this way, Park incorporates positive racial representation through the subway and its passengers. By re-creating the rhythm of the coach through the subway train, Park considers two historical ideas: the New York City subway was built by racial and ethnic minorities such as Irish immigrants and African Americans, and the subway also softly calls back to the beginnings of the American transcontinental railroad that erased the visibility of Chinese immigrant laborers. This essay contends that the transportation systems in nineteenth-century England and twenty-first-century New York created changes that liberated women from the rooted domestic ideologies of their respective periods.

This essay makes a case for viewing curriculum and the historical assemblages of slavery, racialization, and migration as infrastructures of Victorian literary studies. It does so by taking the recent curricular revision that the English department at Lehman College, a public, Hispanic-Serving Institution in the Bronx, New York, underwent as its starting point. I reflect on how this curricular overhaul, which was catalyzed by student activism, helped me see not only how curriculum has operated as an infrastructure of whiteness in my department and English studies at large but also how disentangling Victorian studies from its white Anglo assumptions will require reconceptualizing the methodological, epistemological, and historical foundations of the field.

This article examines a range of texts produced by authors from different caste-class backgrounds in the Bombay Presidency in Western India between the 1850s and the 1920s. They were composed for commemorating special occasions such as the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne (1897) or the visits to India of the Prince of Wales (1876, 1922) and King George V (1911). These texts offer an opportunity for us to understand the various points of view about the British royalty as manifested in the world of Marathi speakers ranging from the harshly critical to the unabashedly loyalist, with many shades in between. The yardstick of modern nationalism has a fixed and negative image of what royalism represented for the colonial subjects. This article seeks to redress the balance.

Starting with Queen Victoria's address to the Proclamation Durbar in 1877, this article surveys how Bengali writers critiqued British colonialism in India through their stories, songs, poetry, journalism, and lectures, sometimes directly about the queen herself, more often when discussing governance, social reform, and the desire for political liberty.

The drive toward precision, punctuality, and an accurate global mapping of the ocean has always been in tension with the forces that undermine and undercut the attempt: human failure, bad weather, broken instruments, bad luck, and so on. The serial labor of embedding infrastructure is risky and requires both improvisatory skills and persistence. The ships that paid out the telegraph cable, and the many kinds of serial writing that took place onboard these ships, were all part of the infrastructural endeavor of the nineteenth century, and they anticipated the digital as much as the cables did themselves. If we think of their role as actively and serially remaking positionality in this uneven imperial world, we can think of serial data produced onboard moving ships in the nineteenth century as shaping an infrastructure that powerfully anticipates the digital.

This paper considers fossil fuel infrastructure alongside the punctuation infrastructure of writing. It focuses, in particular, on the period—as both punctuation and time frame—to ask how one demarcates the Victorian period in the context of climate change impacts that exceed it. The paper itself traverses different temporal periods and different forms of punctuation to make its point that infrastructure, while often unnoticed, shapes both ideas and action.

“Aajkal Agra ka mausam kaisa hai?” Queen Victoria asks herself, alone in her sumptuous quarters at Osborne House.1 How is the weather in Agra these days? Polite small talk, the loose change of a British monarch's verbal currency, recasts itself in unfamiliar phonemes as the empress of India practices her Hindustani. Soon, Agra will retreat from the imperial consciousness; it will be time to go to the durbar room, or work on her Urdu writing under the munshi's tutelage, perhaps before lunching on chicken curry.2

Historians and literary critics often observe that Victorian London had no Baron Haussmann to impose a rational, legible order on its tangle of streets. But the itineraries traced by early forms of public transportation—omnibuses, hackney cabs, and railways—nonetheless invited a reimagining and remapping of the city. Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz (1836), midcentury encyclopedic cab fare guides, and the debates that preceded the building of the 1863 Metropolitan Underground Railway overwrote the existing geography of the city with a cartographic infrastructure tactically organized into routes, nodes, intervals, and destinations.

Photography may seem primarily a technology of image-making, but it was in fact a powerful mode of meaning-making in the nineteenth century, and its operation as such was actively under negotiation from its invention. This essay examines the photograph's status as both documentary object and artistic expression, drawing on examples including journalistic, political, and familial uses of the medium as well as the forms of entertainment it provided. As a force of knowledge production—whether helping consolidate emerging sentimental ideals of family relations, forwarding anthropological understandings of the world, or supporting the work of spiritualists claiming to commune with the dead—photography was used to clarify and shape people's ideas about phenomena they did not understand and often otherwise could not see. As such, it became a vital infrastructure for the transmission of culture and the consolidation of national identity.