UNDER THE DIRECTION OF ITS FIRST EDITOR, William Maginn, Fraser’s Magazine purveyed popular images of literary life in the 1830s through its Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters — Daniel Maclise’s engravings of contemporary literary figures accompanied by Maginn’s irreverent textual commentary — and through humorous depictions of the supposed staff meetings of “The Fraserians” themselves (figure 1), whom Miriam Thrall described as “care-free scholars, who laughed so heartily, and drank so deeply, and wrote so vehemently around their famous editorial table” (16). Composed by Maginn in imitation of Blackwood’s wildly successful Noctes Ambrosianae, which he had helped to write prior to the founding of Fraser’s in 1830, these imaginary meetings of London literati present a comic conception of authorship as a clubby activity, rebelliously bohemian and exclusively male. Patrick Leary’s 1994 essay on the actual management of Fraser’s as a literary business demonstrates just how inaccurate these highly fictitious accounts were and thereby contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of authorship in the 1830s. But if we are examining the influence Fraser’s had on its contemporary readers, then the facts of literary life which Leary discovers “beyond the imagery” of the magazine may be less important than the fictions which such representations of authorship communicated (107).

EVENBEFORE ESTHER LYON enters the narrative of Felix Holt, she is introduced to the eponymous hero, whom she will eventually marry, through two smells — one present, the other absent; one highly conventional, the other distinctly unusual. As the narrator explains, Mr. Lyon’s sitting room contains “certain things” that are “incongruous” with its “general air” of “privation,” among them the “delicate scent of dried rose-leaves” and a wax candle. Lyon, embarrassed by what he takes to be Felix Holt’s unspoken criticism of such indulgence, explains to his visitor, “You are doubtless amazed to see me with a wax-light . . . but this undue luxury is paid for with the earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her” (Eliot 53–54; ch. 5).1 Esther’s association with the scent of roses is quite unremarkable: it simply and quickly registers her as a wholly acceptable marriage partner. Lyon’s reference to the smell of tallow candles is, however, according to the practices of Victorian fiction, quite unconventional, first because it explicitly evokes a smell that is not there, the strong odor of candles made from animal fat; secondly, because it identifies a good smell or the relative lack of one, that of wax candles, with a negative moral judgment: Esther’s practice of spending her earnings on such candles is, to Lyon at least,

IT IS DIFFICULT TO DISCUSS the Victorian women’s rights movement and the antifeminist backlash which ensued without mentioning Eliza Lynn Linton’s contribution. Known primarily as the author of the notorious Saturday Review essay, “The Girl of the Period” (1868), Linton was and has been viewed primarily as an essayist who verbally lashed middle-class, progressive women. As late as the 1880s and 1890s, she maintained an active role in the woman-question debate, publishing her “Wild Women” essays, writing a New Woman novel, The New Woman in Haste and At Leisure, and reissuing her Girl of the Period (G.O.P) essays in volume form. Linton scholars have been particularly intrigued by the discrepancies between Linton’s emancipated lifestyle and the restricted one she advocated for other women. How could the first salaried woman journalist in England maintain such a hostile attitude towards her professionally inclined cohorts? More significantly, how could a woman who wrote one of the most radical, protofeminist novels of her time, Realities (1851), suddenly shift to promoting women’s subjection? Various, compelling answers have been offered to such questions. Vineta Colby, in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, and Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets, and William Veeder in The Woman Question. Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 contend that the contradictions between Linton’s lifestyle and her antifeminist essays mirror Victorian England’s own contradictory attitudes regarding gender relations.1

IN 1839, G. A. WALKER, a London surgeon, published Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly Those in London. Three years later Parliament appointed a House of Commons select committee to investigate “the evils arising from the interment of bodies” in large towns and to consider legislation to resolve the problem.1 Walker’s study opens with a comprehensive history of the modes of interment among all nations, showing the wisdom of ancient practices that removed the dead from the confines of the living. The second portion of the book describes the pathological state of forty-three metropolitan graveyards in an effort to convince the public of the need for legislative interference by the government to prohibit burials in the vicinity of the living.2 Walker’s important work attracted the attention of Parliament and social reformers because of his comprehensive representation of the problem of graveyards, especially among the poor districts of London; his rudimentary statistics that, in effect, isolated them from the rest of the society; and his unbending insistence that national legislators solve the problem. These three impulses influenced the way Edwin Chadwick, secretary to the New Poor Law Commission from 1834 to 1842 and commissioner for the Board of Health from 1848 to 1852, identified and represented the problem of corpses and graveyards in his A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843).

“THE NATION is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal improvement,” argued Samuel Smiles in his 1859 Self-Help, the work that codified the supremacy of aspiration over occupation as a marker of identity for thousands of readers on the ill-defined boundary of the lower-middle and upper-working classes (16; ch. 1).1 Smiles’s importance, then and now, lies not in his invention of “self-improvement” as a defining feature of this group, but rather in his skill at publicly expressing the complex set of ideals and values that had already been worked out in, and expressed by, small groups of improvers for at least two generations.

An actor is one who repeats a portion of a story invented by another.

— George Moore, “Mummer-Worship” (1891)

THE COMPLEXITIES OF GEORGE MOORE’S CHARACTER, his reactions to Victorian life, and his experimentation with literary styles and genres make him a persistently marginal, albeit intriguing, character in literary studies. “[H]is best work,” Lloyd Fernando has observed, “rests to this day in an artistic as well as social limbo which resists complete definition” (10). A Mummer’s Wife (1885), his second novel, has been studied for Moore’s debt to French novelists, in particular Flaubert, or for the author’s reaction to the British circulating libraries’ power.1 In response to controversy over A Mummer’s Wife’s perceived crudeness, Moore claimed “I have a great part to play — I am fighting that Englishman [sic] may exercise a right which they formerly enjoyed, that of writing freely and sanely” (qtd. in Hone 114), even appointing himself “un ricochet de Zola en Angleterre.”2 Without exception then, author and scholars regard A Mummer’s Wife as a transitional work, the book that brought naturalism into the British tradition. The novel, however, suspended in that artistic and social limbo, has not come under scrutiny for additional and alternative readings.3

BY THE LAST DECADES OF THE nineteenth century, the various aspects of the “Woman Question” had drawn many women into public controversy. Their published writings commonly advance both moral and practical arguments, and often cite supporting statistical evidence and scholarly opinions as well. But not all their writing is of this kind. Feminist1 argument around the turn of the century also generated some fine rhetorical flights which stand out from their more prosaic surroundings. Passages of elevated and figurative persuasive writing are found in essays, monographs, and occasionally novels. Today these writings may be found in the many anthologies of “first-wave” feminist writing, which draw on the London journals, especially the Contemporary Review. Female activists in America often use a similar style. Consistent features in this rhetoric suggest that something like a distinctive feminist authorial position had developed.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

—Percy Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”

THESE WORDS, written in 1821, celebrate the figure of the poet as leader and prophet.1 By noting that this position is “unacknowledged,” however, Shelley intimates that the Industrial Revolution sweeping Britain threatens to shrink the political and social relevance of poets. While Shelley makes no mention of class distinctions in “A Defence of Poetry,” had he paused to consider the relative status of the poet in class terms, he would probably have admitted that his era’s working-class versifiers were, with a few exceptions, the most unacknowledged poets of all.

Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns.

—Chartism

THUS WROTE THOMAS CARLYLE in his famous long pamphlet Chartism, published in December 1839. But what moved Carlyle, the intellectual hero of the age, to direct attention in Chartism to the Irish presence in the early Victorian city? Why did he present the Irish in England in such negative terms? Was his analysis correct? And what was the wider significance of his interpretation? These, as Carlyle might have said, are measurable questions and they form the essential framework of this paper. Yet it is impossible to respond to these questions without first examining the contemporary social, economic, and political contexts within which Chartism was written; Carlyle’s development as an historian in the early 1830s; and the purpose of Chartism, including the chapter on the Irish entitled “The Finest Peasantry in the World.”

IT IS A CRITICAL COMMONPLACE that homosexuality — or, to use a more common term of the period, “male love” — appears as a theme in certain of Oscar Wilde’s works.1 It is also a critical commonplace that many Victorian readers were aware of this fact.2 Scant attention, however, has been given to homosexual themes in Wilde’s first book, his 1888 collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which he supplemented in 1891 with a second collection, A House of Pomegranates. The lack of critical attention is surprising, considering that the fairy tales not only mark the beginning of Wilde’s “reputation as an author” (Ellmann 299), but were written in the wake of his first homosexual experience — with Robert Ross in 1886 — a coincidence which gives us grounds to expect, or at least suspect, the presence of homosexual themes.3

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, a governess was the primary educator of male and female children in a middle-class household; particularly by virtue of her work educating girls through their mid-teens, the governess simultaneously effected and disrupted the transparent transmission of class and gender identity between generations of middle-class women. Recent scholarship has de-emphasized this pedagogical function in its readings of the figure.1 Discussion has centered, instead, on the ways in which the governess represented a crisis for early Victorian definitions of bourgeois femininity (which centered on middle-class women’s financial dependence and apparent leisure) because she was a middle-class woman who earned her own living. But to read the figure of the Victorian governess through Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is to see that she troubled bourgeois hegemony because of her job. I contend that the governess disturbed the early Victorians not only because she blurred the boundary between the separate spheres, but also because she dramatized the potentially illimitable effects of education. When you hire someone to teach your children, how do you ensure that she is teaching what you wish and as you wish?

IF JOURNAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ERAS reflect their times truly, Victorians and their predecessors did not manage their faces as we do ours. We of the twenty-first century grin or grimace without restraint, but the Victorians checked the impulse to show their teeth. When we engage in an unguarded smile, our show of teeth is intended and taken to mean merely that we are in good spirits or good company. Pictorial evidence indicates that when the Victorians did likewise, the expression held other meaning.

THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY both the English popular and scientific communities increasingly argued for a distinct racial difference between the Irish Celt and the English Saxon, which conceptually undermined the Victorian attempt to form a single kingdom from the two peoples. The ethnological discourse concerning Irish identity was dominated by English theorists who reflect their empire’s ideological necessity; thus, the Celt and Saxon were often described as racial siblings early in the nineteenth century when union seemed possible, while later descriptions of the Irish as members of a distant or degenerate race reflect the erosion of public sympathy caused by the era of violence following the failed revolt of 1848. Amid this deluge of scientific discourse, the Irish were treated as mute objects of analysis, lacking any opportunity for formal rejoinder; nonetheless, these essentially English discussions of racial identity and Irishness also entered into the Irish popular culture.

I

ON JULY 23, 1830, Parliament passed “An Act to permit the general Sale of Beer and Cyder by Retail in England.” Commonly known as the Beer Act of 1830, this law called for a major overhaul of the way beer was taxed and distributed in England and Wales. In place of a sixteenth-century statute that had given local magistrates complete control over the licensing of brewers and publicans, the Beer Act stipulated that a new type of drinking establishment, the beer shop, or beer house, could now be opened by any rate-paying householder in England or Wales (Scotland and Ireland had their own drink laws). For the modest annual licensing fee of two guineas, rate-payers in England could now purchase a license to brew and vend from their own residence.1

DEBATES ABOUT FEMALE EMIGRATION to the British colonies throughout the Victorian era routinely capitalize on the crucial role women could play in consolidating the empire through the civilizing mission. Advocates of female emigration frequently publicized the benefits of “matrimonial colonization,” a rendering of what is now called republican motherhood that defines women’s place in the nation in terms of their domestic and reproductive roles.1 The founding in 1862 of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCES) by two educated middle-class women, Maria Rye and Jane Lewin, marked a departure from this conventional approach to female emigration. The work of the FMCES was carried out in the spirit of energy and determination that characterized the period of growing feminist activity in the 1860s, when the British rhetoric about “superfluous” women was reaching the tenor of a national crisis.2 While campaigns for improving female education and employment opportunities were long-term solutions to the problem, emigration offered a more immediate palliative. Concerned primarily with the plight of single, middle-class women, Rye and Lewin saw in emigration an alternative plot to the tragic denouement in poverty and spinsterhood that awaited a large proportion of Britain’s population of single, unemployed women. Ignoring the civilizing mission and the inducements for genteel women to marry or to become domestic servants in the colonies,3 Rye and Lewin instead focused on creating a class-differentiated access into colonialism by enabling single middle-class women, most of whom were governesses,

THE 1831 SLAVE NARRATIVE THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE is generally thought to be Mary Prince’s autobiography.1 However, there is reason to believe that neither the narrating voice nor Prince’s name are actually hers, and that the agency ascribed to her in this narrative may be more representative of the agendas of external creators of the text than of Prince herself. In The History of Mary Prince, Prince’s name appears in various forms (Mary Prince, Mary Princess of Wales, Mary James, and Molly Wood) each of which reflects the objectives of different editors and owners. Editorial and mediatory figures such as Thomas Pringle, Susanna Moodie (née Strickland), John Wood, Moira Ferguson, and Ziggi Alexander manifest their influence in intrusions into the narrative, appendices, editorial prefaces, and introductions, all of which serve to construct Prince in ideologically and politically loaded ways, and which, in many cases, actually change her name by so doing. These givers of names generally attempt to hide their manipulations, and inadvertently also hide Prince.

AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Victorian painting experienced at least one mass media event, so far as circulation is concerned — the appearance of Frederic Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche (1890) on the wall of the drug kingpin in Paul Thomas Anderson’s notorious film Boogie Nights of 1997. As a ferocious deal is going awry, over the desperate dealers looms one of the masterpieces of the Victorian High Renaissance, a commentary through the cool classicism of the late Victorians about the corresponding fin-de-siècle of the lately finished century. It is a stunning moment — perhaps recognized only by historians of British art — but there it is nonetheless. One is to presume that the dealer has acquired the original from the Tate Gallery, since he would never own a copy, let alone a poster! Busboy superstud Mark Wahlberg has brief, violent contact with a masterpiece.

Women are occasionally governors of prisons for women, overseers of the poor, and parish clerks. A woman may be ranger of a park; a woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.

— Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854)

ON OCTOBER 5, 1860, GEORGE HENRY LEWES VISITED a solicitor in London to consult about investments. He wrote in his journal: “[The Solicitor] took me to a stockbroker, who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly. For £1825 she gets £1900 worth of stock guaranteed 5%” (qtd. in Ashton, Lewes 210). Thus Marian Evans, called Polly by her close friends, known in society as Mrs. Lewes and to her reading public as George Eliot, became a shareholder in British India. Whether or not Eliot thought of buying stock as taking part in the government of a great empire, as her friend Barbara Bodichon had written in 1854, the 5% return on her investment was a welcome supplement to the income she had been earning from her fiction since 1857. From 1860 until her death in 1880, she was one of a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.1 Lewes’s journals for 1860–1878 and Eliot’s diaries for 1879–80 list dividends from stocks in Australia, South Africa, India, and Canada. These include: New South Wales, Victoria, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town Rail, Colonial Bank, Oriental Bank, Scottish Australian, Great Indian Peninsula, Madras. The Indian and colonial stocks make up just less than half of the total holdings. Other stocks connected to colonial trade (East and West India Docks, London Docks), domestic stocks (the Consols, Regents Canal), and foreign investments (Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and Ft. Wayne) complete the portfolio.2

THE IDYLLIC FREEDOM OF THE CHILD OF NATURE was a popular notion in both the Romantic and Victorian periods. But the wild child, or what we might call the child of nature taken to extremes, stirs the imagination in deeper ways. This is the child represented as radically orphaned, existing outside of language, and alienated from human social bonds; yet it establishes bonds with the natural world that mimic human object relations and thus suggests an oceanic dyadic connectedness with the non-human. Linking the idea of wildness with the idea of child, the nineteenth-century adult imagination generates a figure of “danger and desire” (1.472), to appropriate Wordsworth’s evocative phrase, one which represents both impossible connection and irremediable alienation.

HAVING SURVIVED THE Y2K HYSTERIA, we may feel we have entered new corridors of one hundred and one thousand years. But it is only in 2001 that the punctilious and historical among us may at last observe a centennial, truly the final year of the past century and the hundredth anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria.1 The Jubilees in the last decades of Victoria’s life, and the ceremonies of international mourning that followed her death, might seem to have said goodbye to all that, but in many ways we are still under the sway of the great queen who lent her name to the age before “the American century.” Our own fin-de-siècle urges us to rediscover the many forms of Victoria that have “been hidden in plain view for a hundred years,” as Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich put it in their co-edited collection of essays, Remaking Queen Victoria (1).2 While North American and British feminist studies have dwelt among Victorian ways since the 1970s — with implications that I will consider below — the queen herself has recently commanded critical attention that might seem, like so many features of Victoria’s public performance, out of proportion. Yet that excess, like our obeisance to the arbitrary power of the calendar, seems to be the very stuff of imagined community and ideological construction, and thus worth watching in action. In any case, when feminist literary critics such as Adrienne Munich, Margaret Homans, and Gail Turley Houston