In Walter C. Phillips's Classic Study of 1919, Dickens, Reade, and Collins, Sensation Novelists: A Study in the Conditions and Theories of Novel Writing in Victorian England, there comes an instant when the critic believes himself to have caught the last of his novelists in a moment of artlessness. Remarking on the comforting and seemingly-conformist opening of Wilkie Collins's No Name, Phillips comments that “in the early sixties . . . the popular drift toward realism – stories of domestic life – had compelled some modification of Collins's . . . original melodramatic scheme” (133). Collins's predilection for artfulness is well-established. Rejecting his suggestions for an earlier foreshadowing of the Dr. Manette subplot in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens comments in October 1859, “I do not positively say that the point you put, might not have been done in your manner; but I have a very strong conviction that it would have been overdone in that manner.” He goes on to characterize Collins's suggested revision as potentially off-putting for the readership because it would inevitably be discovered and the situation consequently judged “too elaborately trapped, baited, and prepared” (Letters 9: 127). This essay is in a sense an exploration of the special utility inherent in Collins's elaborately prepared traps for the reader. The elaborate plan can sometimes go places, make certain philosophical critiques, that the accommodative plot cannot. Collins was not known to be a writer who changed course easily in the face of criticism. Thus, it is surprising to find Phillips, as well as other literary critics, taking his opening in No Name seriously and as a sort of conservative retreat on Collins's part. But traps being what they are, that is, made to be fallen into, Phillips's misunderstanding is understandable. The opening of No Name does most assuredly invite such an interpretation. I will be arguing here, however, that, far from attempting to accommodate a newly emergent popular Victorian domestic taste, and pulling back from a previous subversive stance, Collins especially in his opening but also throughout his non-canonical masterpiece is actually covertly attacking that taste at its very foundations.

It is well known that many of Dickens's novels were published in monthly serial parts. Not so commonly known is that each of these monthly numbers consisted not only of Dickens's words and his illustrator's pictures but also a substantial advertising supplement. In the original serial numbers of The Pickwick Papers, the presence of advertising cannot escape notice. Before reaching the illustrations that precede the novel in each serial part, the Victorian reader would have encountered “The Pickwick Advertiser,” a paratextual supplement that consisted of page upon page of advertisements for all manner of commodities. At the end of the last chapter of the serial number were usually around ten further pages of advertising stitched in before the back cover (which was also filled with publicity material). Almost one third of the material text of Pickwick in parts consisted of advertising material (Hatton and Cleaver xiii).

Nineteenth-century Protestant culture generally held marriage in high esteem, and the notion that marriage was “made in heaven” often explicitly undergirds the conventional resolution of domestic fiction. Despite many indications of a harmonious relationship between human love and religious faith, a countervailing cultural trend reveals a deep conflict between the two. Victorian Protestants worried that passionate love for another mortal creature might lead to heretical extremes, that human love might slip into idolatry, the worship of false and material gods. Jane Eyre memorably confesses that she has “made an idol” of Rochester, although she, of course, looks back upon this transgression from the vantage of marital happiness (274). In this essay, I focus on works in which misgivings about idolatrous love arise with more disruptive force. The marriage plots of Charles Kingsley's Yeast: A Problem (1851) and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) both abruptly collapse, bringing into sharp focus a Protestant religious anxiety that subverts the conventional device with which Victorian domestic novels achieve closure.

Two marble statues, each representing a reclining, sleeping nude of somewhat indeterminate sex, sit at the heart of Swinburne's early collections of poetry: the Hellenistic Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Figure 1) in his Poems and Ballads (1866) and Michelangelo's allegorical figure La Notte (Figure 2) in his “In San Lorenzo” sonnet in Songs before Sunrise (1871). Swinburne's dealings with the Hermaphrodite have had a long and ever increasing bibliography; his fascination with Michelangelo's sculpture has, to my knowledge, not yet provoked much scholarly attention. This imbalance may partly be ascribed to the immediate sex appeal of the Hermaphrodite – this “late Romantic freak,” as Camille Paglia appropriately called it (413) – which in the gendered critical discourse of the 1990s has given rise to a whole range of exciting explorations of Swinburne and the body, Swinburne and androgyny, Swinburne and poetic blindness. The Michelangelo statue was, however, turned into a poetic and political monument by Swinburne under far less erotically charged circumstances in the volume dedicated to Guiseppe Mazzini, and opens for different routes of inquiry.

When, on 17 November 1868, Anthony Trollope came bottom of the poll at Beverley in Yorkshire, his cherished ambition to become a Liberal MP was at an end. He had advocated the key elements of the liberal program – Irish Church disestablishment and national education – but this mattered little in a notoriously corrupt borough which was shortly to be stripped of its representation (Tingay). He later explained in his Autobiography (1883) that since he was deprived of a parliamentary seat, he instead used characters in his fiction “for the expression of my political or social convictions . . . they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul” (112–13). This reflection starkly conveys the sense of a man literally bursting with opinions, but it sits oddly with the common view of critics that Trollope's parliamentary novels depicted political life primarily in social terms; that unlike Disraeli he was not especially interested in exploring issues and testing convictions; and that he had “very few political ideas” (Brantlinger 209).

In an 1867 treatise on diamonds and precious stones, Harry Emanuel writes the following:

In the last months of her life, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) returned to one of her earliest and most popular works, The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), and devoted time between attacks of severe bronchitis to revising it. The revised novel was published in 1859 under the name of Luxima, the Prophetess: A Tale of India. According to the unattributed preface to Luxima it was “greatly altered,” receiving the final touches only a few days before Owenson's death on April 16, 1859 (Luxima iii; preface). The revisions are extensive. Most prominent of all is the excision of tracts of particularly purple prose, and the reining in of some of the elements that mark The Missionary as a novel of sensibility. These changes were considered prudent even in 1811: an otherwise complimentary notice on The Missionary in Critical Review urges the author to “divest her style of its luxuriant redundancies, and to write in a more simple and natural manner.” Another reviewer styled the novel “outrageously romantic” (qtd. in Missionary 298). Yet despite recent critical consensus that Owenson's 1859 revisions were for the most part cosmetic, it seems unlikely that in her death throes Owenson spent sleepless nights worrying about lukewarm reviews of a novel she had written over forty years earlier.

In 1840, thePhrenological Journal published an anonymous personal testimony of phrenological salvation titled “Remarkable Case of Change of Character and Pursuits.” The article appears in the “Cases and Facts” section of the periodical, commonly reserved for correspondents who provided personal accounts of the truth of phrenology. The correspondent in this “Case” makes use of the conventional structure of the conversion narrative: youthful deviance, a moment of illumination, and rebirth into a new life of virtue, peace, and joy. Beginning with a description of his former life, he explains that being “Born in the lap of luxury – bred in the tainted atmosphere of opinion” led to the “best years of [his] existence [being] passed in idle, if not in sinful pursuits.” After becoming a military officer, his dissolute behavior increases until he finally decides to correct his character, and “the great instrument employed was phrenology” (342). After adopting a disciplined regimen of moral and intellectual mental exercises, he triumphantly emerges as a man who better knows himself and his capabilities. With his “new” character comes a new life more suited to his cultivated faculties: realizing that a soldier's advancement depends on the “number of victims” sacrificed for the country's cause, he “selected the more humble profession of the Civil Engineer, for which [he] believed, phrenologically, nature had made a fair provision.” He concludes by noting that his life has since been prosperous, and that he hopes now to “aid the cause of that science” through the phrenological education of his own children and his public confession in the journal (343).

The “condition of England” in the middle of the nineteenth century was, for most Victorians (and is, indeed, for most modern scholars of the Victorian period), about as far removed from desert pirates and neo-Grecian queens as London from Jerusalem. But such was not the case in 1847 for the ambitious novelist-turned-politician Benjamin Disraeli, himself a mixture of political and social incongruities, who chose to conclude his political trilogy with a novel that bore greater resemblance to an Arabian Nights fantasy than to any mid-Victorian reform fiction. Contemporary readers of Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847) were understandably perplexed: “There is no principle of cohesion about the book, if we except the covers,” complained one reviewer (qtd. in Stewart 229). And, while critics have expanded upon this dismissive condemnation throughout the twentieth century, not much has changed regarding the general critical appraisal or thoughtful analysis of what Disraeli regarded as the favorite of his compositions (Blake 215). The least popular of the Young England novels both in its own day and in ours, Tancred has most frequently been viewed as an anomaly – an abandonment of the political manifesto Disraeli began in Coningsby and continued in Sybil.

Though it has become conventional to refer to the “new cosmopolitanisms” when discussing the resurgence of the term in the 1990s, current debates about cosmopolitanism can be traced back to its usages in the nineteenth century. In both its Victorian and contemporary contexts, cosmopolitanism ranges in connotation from the pejorative to the progressive and in denotation from a phenomenon to an ideal. This constitutive ambivalence helps to explain the controversy that has attended the term, both then and now.

Although “cosmopolitanism” is, in many respects, the recognized creation of the eighteenth century, in recent years the idea has made a mark on the theory and practice of Victorian studies. In this essay I offer some reflections on this development while suggesting one future path for a Victorianist cosmopolitan practice. My goal is to limn a theory of what I call “the Victorian geopolitical aesthetic” which, in grasping the globalizing dynamics of the nineteenth century, illuminates the literature and culture of that era. By way of doing so, I will explore cosmopolitan literary study as it has so far developed, describing its focus on ethics. I will also try to update the legacy of historical materialism (including the work of Georg Lukács, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson) by integrating it with newer transnational perspectives such as cosmopolitanism and the new Atlantic studies. My aim is to suggest ways of reading Victorian literature – specifically realist fiction but potentially other genres as well – which recognize the power of literature to engage “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” then and now.

When Carlyle praises “wondrous Dualism” in Past and Present, he invokes a model for conceptualizing man's role in the world that held widespread, even hegemonic currency in mid-Victorian culture. The centrality of dualist discourse during the mid-Victorian period, thanks in part to Carlyle's translations of German literature and philosophy in the 1830s, cannot be overstated. Carlyle argues that dualism transhistorically frames all human activity: “In wondrous Dualism, then [in the year 1200] as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil” (50; bk. 2, ch. 1). The subject “man” – I use the masculine advisedly – endlessly oscillates between the opposing elements that constitute the universe. This, for Carlyle, is the position of all men. To be heroic, however, one must recognize and negotiate the most wondrous dualism of all, time and eternity: “this Earthly life, and its riches and possessions, and good and evil hap, are not intrinsically a reality at all, but are a shadow of realities eternal, infinite; that this Time-world, as an air-image, fearfully emblematic, plays and flickers in the grand still mirror of Eternity; and man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell” (72; bk. 2, ch. 6). Minor dualisms are subsumed in the opposition between “Time-world” and “Eternity,” and in the “mirror” of the latter, man discerns himself: his ultimate insignificance, yet the greatness of his “Duties.” Carlyle emphasizes that these duties demand the payment of obedience to one's temporal and eternal superiors – heroic ancestors, captains of industry, colonial governors, and God. Only then can heroic men once again be born, like the laboring Hercules or the humble Christ, from temporal-eternal intercourse.

This short paper proposes to consider the transition from Bleak House (1852–53) to Little Dorrit (1856–57) as a phase of particular significance in Dickens's debate with himself over the claims, benefits, and pitfalls of national and wider forms of belonging. I elide Hard Times (1854) because it seems to me that with the composition of Bleak House Dickens had definitively arrived at the conviction that the twenty-number monthly novel was that one of his novelistic forms best suited to sustained exploration and testing of capacious social networks making claims upon individuals' identification and loyalty. In Bleak House – as I have argued in Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (2005) – Dickens responds to the false universalism of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by producing his most restrictively “national” of novels, programmatically and demonstratively shutting out a wider world in order to produce an image of Britain that negatively foreshadows the kind of autarkic, autotelic fantasies of single cultures associated with the classic functionalist ethnography of the early twentieth century, as practiced by such luminaries as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. “Negatively” is key here, since anticipations of ethnography in nineteenth-century British (autoethnographic) fiction typically involve representation of the nation as “a form of anticulture whose features define by opposition the ideals [later] attributed to genuine cultures” (Buzard, Disorienting 21). Whereas the fast-disappearing genuine culture of ethnographic literature was credited with the integrated totality of “a sturdy plant growth, each remotest leaf and twig of which is organically fed by the sap at the core” (Sapir 90–93), Britain's culture vouchsafed in Bleak House and exemplified in the tentacular Court of Chancery presents “a state of disastrous and inescapable interconnection,” “a culture-like vision of social totality that is simply marked with a minus sign” (Buzard, Disorienting 21).

In an 1857 Saturday Review article of the novel Two Years Ago, T. C. Sanders characterizes Charles Kingsley's ideal man: he “fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours – [he] breathes God's free air on God's rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker around his fingers” (qtd. in Haley 108). Tom Thurnall, the fearless, constitutionally robust, well-traveled doctor and hero of Two Years Ago, fits these requirements. His physical strength also manifests itself as a charmed immunity to illness: during a cholera epidemic in Aberalva (a fictional Cornish town), “[Tom] thought nothing about death and danger at all . . . Sleep he got when he could, and food as often as he could; into the sea he leapt, morning and night, and came out fresher each time” (Kingsley, Years 288). Charles Kingsley's own self-proclaimed medical and religious philosophies give clear insight into Two Years Ago's intended effects. A sanitary reformer in the mould of Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale, Kingsley felt that disease arose from crowding, filth, and poisonous vapors. Kingsley's contemporaries named his perspective “muscular Christianity,” recognizing that Kingsley “strong arms” his readers by inspiring in them fear and uncertainty about their own health practices and then shows them the way, with examples like Tom, to an active, devout lifestyle.

In between writing Middlemarch (1872) and her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot recorded in her notebook that she wanted her fiction to explore “great turning points” in history by depicting “in detail” not only “the various steps by which a political or social change was reached” but also “the pathos, the heroism often accompanying the decay and final struggle of old systems, which has not had its share of tragic commemoration” (Essays 402). Indeed, by writing Daniel Deronda, the only one of her novels set in her contemporary moment, Eliot seems intent on examining shifts, presumably incomplete ones, taking place during her life. The incomplete nature of change may be echoed in the novel's unusual bifurcation: famously, its two plots address the title character, Daniel Deronda, who searches for a way to serve humanity, and Gwendolen Harleth, a beautiful woman who must address the narcissism she has been encouraged to develop. Deronda's story traces his gradual discovery and acceptance of his Jewish heritage, while Gwendolen has a story line that is only indirectly related to Deronda: she suffers in a tragic marriage and only partially comes to terms with the position of femininity in late Victorian England. Many readers hope, or simply expect, that the two stories will be joined in Daniel and Gwendolen's romance and marriage. Dismayed, however, by a double plot where Deronda and Gwendolen have separate trajectories and endings without marriage, readers and critics have frequently commented on the plot's structural problems, often noting “the narrative disjunction” that is one of the novel's most prominent features (Levine 421).

Readers of Middlemarch (1871–1872) will remember the moment when Brooke's bid to win a seat in Parliament abruptly ends, in the middle of the Reform Bill campaign and in the middle of a speech. He tells the crowd how happy he is to be there. He tells the crowd he is a “close neighbor” of theirs. Then he says the following:

Mary Elizabeth Braddon launched her editorship of Belgravia magazine by painting a picture for her readers of a murderous medical practitioner. At the outset of Birds of Prey (1867), the serial novel which kicked off the magazine's publication, Braddon introduces us to a surgeon-dentist named Philip Sheldon. The narrator ironically explains, “Of course he was eminently respectable . . . A householder with such a door-step and such muslin curtains could not be other than the most correct of mankind” (7; bk. 1, ch. 1). Sensation novels of the 1860s have long been critically recognized as vehicles for revealing the disparity between respectable façades and seedy interior truths, and Braddon's underexamined work Birds of Prey and its sequel Charlotte's Inheritance (1868) are no exception: by the close of the second novel, the seemingly upright Sheldon has been revealed as a liar, a cheat, and a killer.

In October 1894, Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant, a feminist purity reformer, successfully challenged the music and dancing license of the Empire Theatre of Varieties before the licensing committee of the London County Council. Mrs. Chant raised two objections to the management of the Empire: first, that “the promenade, an open space behind the dress circle in front of the bar,” where 500 people circulated nightly, was used “as the habitual resort of prostitutes in pursuit of their traffic.” Her “second indictment” was that parts of the performance on stage were exceedingly indecent, including the costumes of the ballet dancers (“London County Council”). Chant had gone to the Empire promenade, twice dressed in her “best” evening gown, and been herself accosted. Her protest, declared The Sketch, provoked the “battle of the Empire,” a “great fight . . . waged with a war of words, a battery of correspondence, and a skirmish of sketches” (qtd in Faulk 77). Visually commemorated in the illustrated press and in numerous music hall spoofs, the “Battle of the Empire” was most extensively covered in the correspondence columns of the Daily Telegraph, under the heading, “Prudes on the Prowl.”

This essay examines the ways in which New Woman novelists and their critics negotiated and revised Victorian literary canons in the 1880s and 1890s in light of the controversial publications of the Higher and feminist critics of the Bible. It explores the relationship between nineteenth-century literary and religious canons and the ways in which New Woman writers both drew on and intensified contemporary debates on canonicity. While literary canons are often perceived as allowing the possibility of adding new or re-evaluated works whereas biblical canonization seems final and definitive, nineteenth- century discoveries of early, non-canonical Christian writings and fragmentary gospels such as Pistis Sophia and the Gospel of Mary profoundly problematized late-Victorian understandings of the process of canonicity. The growing recognition of the historical significance of such fragments, as well as fierce theological debates in the leading magazines of the day, highlighted canonization as a political procedure which enforced internal coherence and unity at the expense of cultural diversity. Many writers suggested that canonization involved a repression of ideological controversies and a marginalization of competing narratives, a process which was both dramatized and redressed in New Woman fiction. The scholarship that turned to the era before the biblical canon had been sealed explored the conditions which made it final and unassailable, enabling feminist novelists to examine canonicity imaginatively and critically. By drawing attention to the essentially historical and political forces that governed processes of canon formation, New Woman writers sought to expose the narrowness and the limitations of the literary canon within and against which they worked.

Black maritime labor was essential to the capitalist world economy as European nations began to reconsolidate their Atlantic empires in the wake of the Haitian Revolution (1804) and Emancipation in the British West Indies (1838). British merchant vessels plying the waters of these lucrative Atlantic economies were often crewed by those colonial subjects whom they once held as commodities. Atlantic scholarship – most notably Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic – has looked to the chronotope of the seafaring ship in its efforts to chart the cosmopolitan contours of the nineteenth century. For Gilroy, the ship gives figurative expression to a cultural and political remapping of modern racial formations that transcends the “boundaries and integrity of modern nation states” (4). Ships call to mind both the Middle Passage and the mercantile routes that joined the Americas with Europe, Africa, and the plantation zones of the Caribbean. For Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, black maritime circulation thus constituted one aspect of the “many-headed hydra” that unsettled the political sovereignty of European nation-states in the Atlantic world (31).