For almost a decade, George Eliot labored at a translation of seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Ethics, and although completed, it never saw the light of day; it was the subject of a petty fight between the proposed publisher, Henry Bohn, and her partner, George Henry Lewes. The result was that for more than a century it was tucked away, first, presumably, in a drawer, and eventually, in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Although critics and scholars have long known that she had completed this work – references abound in letters and journal entries – it wasn't published until 1981, and even then, in an obscure imprint of the Salzburg University press. Copies of this published edition, which is limited to the Ethics and capably annotated by Thomas Deegan, are quite rare and difficult to get ahold of.

This paper is a study of subject-object relations in British writings about the Indian Uprising of 1857. I focus in particular on accounts vocalizing panic over a colony of objects “baldly encountered” and “not quite apprehended” in the context of remembering and remediating traumatic memories of the Uprising (Brown 5). What follows is an exercise in object-oriented investigation, reading depictions of subject-object and object-subject encounters, analyzing matters-of-concern emerging from the events of 1857 (Latour, “Realpolitik” 14; also, Reassembling 70n80, 114–20).

In a 1908 review article for the Times of London, Thomas Hardy commented on the previous months of excavation of the Neolithic earthwork amphitheater in Dorchester, known as the Maumbury Ring(s). Hardy had returned to Dorchester from London in 1883, and the town is most famously fictionalized in the 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy's description identifies the defining moment in the Ring's history as the execution there in 1706 of the nineteen year-old Mary Channing for allegedly having poisoned her husband. Quoting extensively from a contemporary report of Channing's trial and execution, Hardy asserts that he could find little in the statements of the case to support Channing's execution. His opinion is rather that this was a high spirited young woman forced by her parents to marry a man she did not love, whose weak indulgence of his new wife merely served to contribute to the sense of her being a woman of “careless character” that would see her wrongly condemned.

The emergence of limited liability over the course of the nineteenth century was marked by intense and sustained feelings of anxiety. Victorians debated it in Parliament and in the periodical press, anatomized its evils in fiction and drama, and theorized its merits and pitfalls in the nascent discipline of economics. Formalized at mid-century through a series of acts that collectively instituted what Paul Johnson describes as “companification” – “the substitution of an impersonal corporate legal entity for the sole proprietorship or partnership” – limited liability was the means by which a corporation was constituted as a legal individual in order to restrict the responsibility of a company's owners for its debts (106). Early response to the practice was tentative: though hailed by some as a means of promoting economic growth, limited liability also inspired fear among the public, for whom it seemed a threat both to moral character and to responsible social behaviour. Wary that it would promote dishonesty in business and legitimize irresponsible speculation among investors, the mid-Victorians did not initially rush to invest. Despite the fact that by the final decades of the century many early fears had been realized and anxieties about investment continued unabated, however, there was a marked shift towards a culture of investment (Taylor 212–13). Summarizing the effects of the “‘Limited-Company’ Craze” in the Nineteenth Century in 1898, one commentator observed that “Personal ownership has ceased to be the controlling power in trade; and when it left it took along with it that personal care, personal supervision, and personal responsibility which made our business great.” The result, he suggested, is that “we now have, in thousands of instances, mere ‘corporations without bodies to be kicked or souls to be damned’” (Van Oss 734).

Early in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Daniel's life is set on a decisive new path by his fleeting attraction to an object in a shop window. He is turning into a side street off Holburn Road when:

Although scholars often praise Hardy's “The Fiddler of the Reels” as a work with “considerable power” (The Cambridge Companion 46), the theme of the workings of the market culture in the story has gone uninvestigated. Set against the backdrop of urban transformations that were enacted by the Great Exhibition and the new mass transportation system, the text dramatizes how male impulses fit into larger questions of acquisitive power and how a narrow preoccupation with dominance creates a messy reality. This study argues that exhibitions (in the material, commercial sense of the term) and exhibitionistic celebrity behavior are aligned in “The Fiddler,” and claims that certain Darwinian and Dionysian elements in the story underwrite this theme. To substantiate this argument, my analysis is attentive to two notions: a general notion of economy and a literary notion of the trickster as expounded by C. G. Jung and Mikhail Bakhtin. Before taking my argument further, I will summarize the plot of “The Fiddler.”

Religion in Dracula studies has often looked a little like the Un-Dead Lucy, a ghastly simulacrum of living faith. Indeed, readings of the novel frequently depend on a suspicious approach to the novel's professions of piety, one that regards them as a mask for more fundamental concerns: the heroes profess religious concern, but what they really want is to neutralize the New Woman, or racial degeneration, or sexual perversion. Under these conditions, Christianity provides, at best, a potent discourse through which the characters can manage these coded crises. When religion does enter the conversation, critics tend to read the text for clues to Stoker's personal position on the theological controversies of his day: the Catholic-Protestant divide in Ireland, the place of High Church ritualism in Anglican worship, the merit of the doctrine of transubstantiation. As a result, we are left with a Dracula that functions as an elaborate code book, encrypting what Stoker secretly (or not-so-secretly) believed.

George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda (1876), a novel that spurred Zionism in Palestine, opens with a scene of watching and thus moves from a male gaze on a woman's body to a project of envisioning a new nation in a distant land. The national drama of the novel turns on the ideological meaning of gazing at landscape, as Daniel Deronda replaces one political perspective with another. Indeed, Mordecai's political dream of a Jewish national future involves “Looking towards a land” (454; bk. 6, ch. 42): his nationalist vision transpires as a gaze upon a far-off place. Colonial ambition itself can be understood as an ideological view of landscape as open to possession, a gaze on the territory of others that insists often violently on itself, to the exclusion of other political perspectives. Motivated not by sex but by moral and political domination, this colonial gaze nationalizes viewership, and makes the landscape it imagines real. For Deronda himself, nationality itself is a kind of viewership. He wants to study abroad, because, he says, “I want to be an Englishman, but I want to understand other points of view” (155; bk. 2, ch. 16). Being an Englishman is a “point of view,” a perspective to claim, to the possible exclusion of other nationalized ways of seeing landscapes both domestic and distant.

As they near the conclusion of their 1890 treatise Broad-Sword and Single-Stick With Chapters on Quarter-Staff, Bayonet, Cudgel, Shillalah, Walking-Stick, Umbrella and Other Weapons of Self-Defense, Baron Headley (Rowland George Allanson-Winn) and C. Phillips-Wolley imagine skeptical readers who resist their admonitions to vigilance: “I can almost hear people say, ‘Oh, this is all rubbish; I'm not going to be attacked; life would not be worth living if one had to be always “on guard” in this way’” (Headley and Phillips-Wolley 111). But, Headley and Phillips-Wolley counter, “this world, from the time we are born to the time we die, is made up of uncertainties” (111). Throughout the text, lurking hoodlums and deceitful beggars embody these “uncertainties,” and at every moment destabilize the security of the unsuspecting gentleman or lady. Uncertainty gathers in these shadowy bodies with such force that the authors declare, “we are never really secure from attack at any moment of our lives” (111). As a remedy for the threat of the uncertain attacker, they suggest “the pursuit of a science,… which may… enable you to turn a defeat into a victory, and save yourself from being mauled and possibly killed in a fight which was none of your own making” (111). In short, the science of self-defense.

These lines begin an “Ode” which has permeated culture throughout the last hundred years. In 1912, Edward Elgar set it to music, as did Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály in 1964, to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Merton College, Oxford. In 1971, Gene Wilder spoke the opening lines as Willy Wonka in the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The words appear as epigraphs in an eclectic range of novels, including science fiction (Raymond E. Feist's Rage of a Demon King), fantasy (Elizabeth Haydon's The Assassin King), and historical fiction (E. V. Thompson's The Music Makers). They are quoted in an even more varied selection of books, including travelogues (Warren Rovetch's The Creaky Traveler in Ireland), textbooks (Arnold O. Allen's Probability, Statistics and Queueing Theory and R. S. Vassan and Sudha Seshadri's Textbook of Medicine), New Age self-help books (Raven Kaldera's Moon Phase Astrology: The Lunar Key to Your Destiny), autobiographies (Hilary Liftin's Candy and Me, a Love Story) and pedagogical guides (Lindsay Peer and Gavin Reid's Dyslexia – Successful Inclusion in the Secondary School).

Let's face it:Impressionsof Theophrastus Such can be a pretty dreary book. It's all too easy to put it down, especially if you happen to be in the middle of a particularly heavy-handed passage in “The Watch-Dog of Knowledge” or “Debasing the Moral Currency.” Some early readers felt that the real George Eliot had abandoned them in her final publication by ceasing to write fiction, while recent critics have gone to some lengths to show that the narrator, allegedly a minimally published bachelor named Theophrastus Such, is a self-reflexive fictional character whose failings and contradictions are the real subject of the book.1 Who is Theophrastus Such? What is his ethical, political, or scientific orientation? How does his character emerge during the course of the volume? These are questions that have occupied recent critical dialogue. In response, I find myself harboring some sympathy for George Saintsbury, who reviewed Impressions in the Academy of 28 June 1879:

Although the Chartist organ the Northern Star was a careful observer of literary developments, especially concerning social-problem fiction, it failed to comment on the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, today the best-known literary work to treat Chartism. The popular and controversial novel about the consequences of an assassination committed by a disillusioned activist slipped by the radical paper unnoticed in the tumult of the fall of 1848. But the Star was not as unfamiliar with Mary Barton as its initial silence suggests. Two years later, when the paper reviewed The Moorland Cottage, it praised Gaskell's earlier book as “a powerful and truthful exposition of the evils inherent in the factory system,” adding that “the graphic manner in which the writer placed before the public the domestic, moral, and social results of factory life, brought down from the upholders of the factory system many sneers at her political economy and her sentimentalism; but none denied the unquestionable genius and superior discrimination of character and motives which pervaded the work” (Dec. 28, 1850).

“A trial and a literary text,” Shoshana Felman once noted, “do not aim at the same kind of conclusion, nor do they strive toward the same kind of effect. A trial is presumed to be a search for truth, but technically it is a search for a decision; and thus. . . it seeks not truth but finality: a force of resolution.” Literature, on the other hand, Felman posits, is characterized by “a search for meaning. . . for heightened significance, for symbolic understanding” (Felman 55). Trials function to curb the proliferation of meanings in favor of finality, if not absolute truth, whereas literature allegedly forgoes such determinacy. A corollary of this distinction has to do with language itself: while law seeks to fix linguistic meaning, literature draws attention to the inherent instability of meaning.

While crediting William Wordsworth's tutelage in his 1887 essay “Books Which Have Influenced Me,” Robert Louis Stevenson indicates that the poet's contribution to his writing is difficult to pin down: “Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth and it is hard to tell precisely how” (164). Seeking to understand this relationship, I examined Stevenson's copy of Wordsworth's The Poetical Works (1858) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Stevenson's penciled markings, cross-references, and annotations fill the six-volume set, indicating careful and repeated reading over many years. Stevenson purchased the edition as he was entering adulthood in Edinburgh, and kept it with him until the end of his life in Samoa. While Stevenson's marginalia cannot be precisely dated, the handwriting alongside Wordsworth's poetry ranges from the large sloped script of his early years (1870--1874) to the smaller, more rounded and upright letters he used in the final period of his life (1890–1894). Given this record and the frequency and depth of Stevenson's allusions to Wordsworth in his fiction, essays, and letters, it is surprising that no study of the relationship has been undertaken. In recent book-length studies of Romantic influences on Victorian writing, Stevenson is rarely mentioned, and never in connection with Wordsworth. Even Stephen Gill's encyclopedic Wordsworth and the Victorians makes no reference to Stevenson.

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wilde's writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.

Old media can be scary – much scarier, ceteris paribus, than other objects of comparable antiquity. Film and television directors, as well as writers of fiction, who traffic in chills know that few things can insert a palpable sense of dread into a mise-en-scène more economically than a strategically placed daguerreotype (its dour or baleful inhabitants staring out from their world of sepia), a tinny voice issuing from an ancient radio, or the needle of a Victrola bobbing cracklingly in grooves of black vinyl. On the other hand, it is at least as much of a truism to say that new media, too, come freighted with anxieties as well as exhilarations: otherwise we would be less susceptible to narratives about being enslaved by a transpersonal Matrix, zombified by our cell phones, and so on. It should not surprise, then, that in our own media-saturated age a host of tropes and topoi derived from information technologies have tended to recur again and again in works of horror film and fiction. Many of these involve interactions between and among media: old technologies acting like new ones, and vice versa; categorial blurrings and hybridizations involving different media within a particular ecology, or the sense of an uncanny partnership or cooperation between them; and so on. Also common are tableaux of trans- or extra-medial transgression: e.g., the figure of dread escaping the representational field and entering the “real world” of the story. Then, too, there is the figure of prodigious or preternatural (and usually unasked-for) perceptual extension or augmentation, the trope of the technology that enables, or compels, one to see and/or hear more than is good for one.

While in recent years there has been a slow accumulation of research exploring the links between Robert Louis Stevenson's work and capitalism, there remains a sense that this is still only an interesting byway when reading him, rather than a central route. Partly, this can be explained by this research having tended to focus on individual texts attached to specialised or circumscribed contemporary frames – the gold versus silver standard debate, for instance, or Victorian economic theory. As revealing as these localised contextualisations are, their connection to the rest of Stevenson's oeuvre, and to the wider operation of late Victorian capitalism, can be somewhat opaque. More broadly, the neglect of this aspect of Stevenson's work can be seen as the continuing legacy of his status as writer and theorist of romance, a fictional mode still often associated with a childish escapism and reactionary politics – despite recent work by Julia Reid and Glenda Norquay showing how Stevenson must be distinguished from fellow romance revivalists such as H. Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, and G. A. Henty, to whom such epithets more properly apply.

Since its introduction at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1891, Luke Fildes's painting The Doctor has earned that often hyperbolic adjective “iconic.” Immediately hailed as “the picture of the year” (“The Royal Academy,” “The Doctor,” “Fine Arts”), it soon toured the nation as part of a travelling exhibition, in which it “attracted most attention” (“Liverpool Autumn Exhibition”) and so affected spectators that one was even struck dead on the spot (“Sudden Death”). Over the following decades it spawned a school of imitations, supposed companion pictures, poems, parodies, tableaux vivants, an early Edison film, and a mass-produced engraving that graced middle-class homes and doctors' offices in Britain and abroad for generations to come and was reputedly the highest-grossing issue ever for the prominent printmaking firm of Agnew & Sons (Dakers 265–66). When Fildes died in 1927 after a career spanning seven decades and marked by many commercial successes and even several royal portraits, his Times obituary nonetheless bore “The Doctor” as its sub-headline (“Sir Luke Fildes”) and sparked a lively discussion of the painting in the letters column for several issues thereafter (“Points From Letters” 2, 4, 5 Mar. 1927). Although the animus against things Victorian in the early twentieth century shadowed The Doctor it never eclipsed it; by the middle of the century the painting was still being held up as the quasi-Platonic ideal of medical practice (“Bedside Manner,” “98.4”), gracing postage stamps, and serving ironically as the logo for both a celebration of Britain's National Health Service and a campaign against its equivalent in the United States. Appreciation of the painting in mid-century art historical circles was echoed in the popular press (“Victorian Art”), and The Doctor was singled out as a highlight of the reorganized Tate Gallery in 1957 (“Tate Gallery”), after which it settled into a sort of dowager status as a cornerstone of that eminent collection, where it is still in the regular rotation for public display. Since the mid-1990s it has been a recurring focus of discussion in both Medical Humanities journals and prominent medical professional organs such as the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, where a steady stream of articles still cite it as a sort of prelapsarian benchmark for the role and demeanor of the ideal medical practitioner.

Herbert Sussman, Editor

Victoria Mills, Assistant Editor

Effie Gray, the Film; Or, the Afterlife of John Ruskin

HERBERT SUSSMAN

Turner Revealed?

JANICE CARLISLE

The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die

ANDREW KING

A World Transformed by the Telegraph

AARON WORTH

Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire

DEBORAH LUTZ

In 1907, writer and Oxford graduate Lionel Portman began his novel The Progress of Hugh Rendal: A 'Varsity Story with an impassioned attack on the university system of fees and credit. “An unrighteous anomaly it seems that on entering Oxford University the first thing you have to do is to pay money,” Portman protests,