Inspired in part by the coincident bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of The Origin of Species in 2009, scholars have been hard at work these last ten years writing substantial histories of nineteenth-century natural history and geology. These histories include exceptional books by scholars trained primarily in literary studies: Cannon Schmitt's Darwin and the Memory of the Human (2009); Daniel Brown's The Poetry of Victorian Scientists (2013); and Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (2007). With a few notable exceptions, however, the books I was invited to review here are written mostly by historians of science. And yet they are no less literary for that. All are marked by a tacit, pragmatic adoption of actor-network theory; by the extraordinary resources of the Darwin Correspondence Project and online databases of British periodicals; and often, too, by glossy illustrations. Further, nearly all of these histories share a methodological investment in what we call the history of the book, including all the economics of publishing (formats, sizes, fonts, prices, print runs, reviews, sales, generic conventions) and a political and heuristic stake in popularization and the general reading public. While Darwin (and Lyell, Herschel, Hooker, Huxley, and Spencer) remain at the center of the discussion, the empirically-minded history-of-the-book approach and investment in everyday readers reconstructs and legitimates a robust popular science that was engaged with, but not subordinate to, and often more liberal than the elite science of the X Club, the Royal Society, and other exclusive institutions. With the help of museums, lectures, tour guides, and other natural scientific literature, everyday readers produced their own knowledge of evolution, stratigraphy, speciation, animal emotion, and the sex life of plants.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) has long suffered accusations of insincerity and expediency, especially with regard to his religious position. The mercurial novelist and prime minister famously evaded reference to his theological opinions. His official biographers, W.F. Moneypenny and G.E. Buckle, claimed that an “absolute reticence as to his personal religion was one of [Disraeli's] marked characteristics” (qtd. in Vincent 38). In June of 1832 – early in Disraeli's literary career – a critic in the Monthly Review even charged him with outright irreligion. The subject of the column was Disraeli's new novel Contarini Fleming (1832), which called itself a “psychological romance.” Speaking to the protagonist's various experiments with the hedonism of poetic expression, devout Roman Catholicism, and political pragmatism throughout the novel, the reviewer asked, “What are we to understand by the exemption from ‘sectarian prejudices’? The absence of religion. What is meant by the [artist's] ‘flowing spirit of creation’? Simply that there is no God” (qtd. in Letters 1: 284). Days after the review was published, Disraeli wrote to his sister, Sarah, “I suppose you have read the Review in the Monthly [-] where I am accused of Atheism, because I retire in Solitude to write novels” (Letters 1: 284).

Since the late 1980s and Elaine Showalter's influential Sexual Anarchy, it has become axiomatic to read Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula as a text that responds to anxieties of degeneration through metaphors of infection (184). Given the obvious sexual nature of the threat represented by the vampire, critics have focused on syphilis as the text's most immediate disease of reference. They have identified many important correspondences between Stoker's text and racialized fears of decline through blood and bloodlines, drawing connections between Stoker's own possible demise from syphilis, the history of contagious diseases legislation, and the scandal surrounding Ibsen's Ghosts (1882). But, as Martin Willis has noted, there continues to be “a need to reassess Dracula within the contexts of disease theories that allows for a more historically rigorous analysis of the novel” (302).

“Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” noticed Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (21). This observation, made in the 1960s, draws upon centuries-old tradition of casting Catholics in the role of sexual perverts, not only in American politics but also in British politics and culture. Through the study of anti-Catholic Victorian writing we can analyse the particular crux embodied in Hofstadter's pithy remark: a mixture of moral superiority combined with prurient enjoyment of the described practices it purports to condemn. This part of my study is dedicated to the Victorian novel and its depictions of Catholic sexuality, which, as the novelists often suggested, was either stifled and warped or rampant, but either way it transgressed the boundaries delineated by the Protestant family ideal. It also discusses Victorian gender roles and the ways in which Catholicism was allegedly undermining them.

We understand little of Harriet Martineau, I am convinced, if we do not see how roots and wings formed the coordinates of both her subjectivity and writing, affecting all the choices she made and all the reasons she gave for those choices. Inextricably bound together like the knot in a rope, her attraction to houses as signs of self must be given equal weight with the experiences of move and travel she wrote of again and again. Emblematic in this sense was perhaps Martineau's own emphatic assessment of herself in a March 1844 letter to Mrs Romilly written during the monotony and impotence of her Tynemouth confinement, in which she described, in terms of a symbolic geography, her sense of being apart and undeniably privileged: “a sort of pioneer in the regions of pain,” this is how she termed herself, “whose mission is to make the way somewhat easier, or at least more direct to those who come after” (Martineau 2007, 2: 262).

Many Victorian commentators, from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin on, saw music as the most primitive of all the arts, an inarticulate precursor of language, and yet many Victorians, particularly towards the end of the century, also saw music as the purest of all art forms. The tremendous tension between these two views meant that music provided, and provides, an ideal way to understand more completely Victorian ideas about evolution, gender, and race in relation to aesthetics, although scholarship on music has only begun to consider those relationships. But as Vernon Lee long ago pointed out, in a series of thoughtful essays about music published in Fraser's Magazine and other periodicals in the 1870s and 1880s, music has always been slower to develop than other arts or fields of study. This is in fact why musicologists speak of “nineteenth-century music,” rather than Victorian music: the Romantic period in music, for example, is starting as the Romantic period in literature had largely ended; the English Musical Renaissance comes after the renaissance period in British literature; and so on. Musicology, likewise, is a comparatively young field, and the study of nineteenth-century British music – long limited to Gilbert and Sullivan, if considered at all – younger yet. Studies of literature that engage with music as an important part of the historical context of a given text depend on developments in musicology for a proper understanding of that context, which is why such works are comparatively few. Why music should be slower to develop than other fields is a question outside the scope of this essay, but the good news is that in the past ten years a number of useful and valuable works of scholarship on nineteenth-century British music have appeared, examining not only neglected composers and musical works, but also performers, concert organizers, music publishers, instruments and their history, and evolutionary, Orientalist, and nationalist discourses about music. This scholarship, valuable in itself, not only expands our knowledge of musicology and cultural history; by pointing out some of the deep connections between literature and music in the Victorian period, such scholarship also suggests new ways to think about literary forms, canon formation, and aesthetic theories.

Digital Victorian studies, as the field might be called, has entered a new generation of endeavor. Of course, many older digital Victorian projects remain online and continue to be important resources for scholars working in a variety of areas. In the pantheon of the older projects we might include: The Victorian Web (Landow; 1987–2012), a long-standing project that presents an array of images and texts linked to the Victorian era as nodes in a complex network; the Rossetti Archive (McGann; 1993–2008), a comprehensive digital collection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry, prose, and visual art as well as diverse contextual materials; NINES (2003-present), a nineteenth-century digital resource aggregator that facilitates integrated searching across a variety of sites and that provides peer review for relevant scholarly projects; the Old Bailey Online (Hitchcock; 2003–15), a large-scale venture that, among other things, makes available digital images and fully searchable, structured text of the 190,000 pages that constitute the Old Bailey Proceedings; and Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) (Brake; 2005–08), a rigorous edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers that explores the issue of modeling nineteenth-century serials in digital form. Many other such projects might also be added. However, the rapid advance of web-based technologies has recently propelled the development of digital Victorian studies in multiple directions at once. The concurrent rise of digital humanities has also ensured that Victorian scholars now have ever more exciting options for creating and analyzing digital Victorian materials and ever more sophisticated questions for interrogating the process by which those materials are created.

There is, perhaps, no richer archive of Victorian reading experiences than Victorian literature itself. We know how Maggie Tulliver, child of the rural Midlands in the early years of the nineteenth century, felt when reading the Imitation of Christ in the bleak aftermath of her father's bankruptcy, how the young David Copperfield felt sitting on his bed in Suffolk, “reading as if for life” in the shadow of an abusive home life (56; ch. iv), and how a besieged Jane Eyre felt reading Bewick's History of British Birds in the window-seat at Gateshead; we know because Eliot, Dickens, and Brontë trace those feelings and their significance in vivid detail. We know more: Maggie's book, is a “little, old, clumsy book. . .the corners turned down in many places” with “certain passages” marked in “strong pen and ink,” one of a job lot brought to her by Bob, the packman (301; bk. 4, ch. 3). We know that the novels available to David from the small collection on his father's shelf were largely picaresque tales from a hundred years earlier, Gil Blas, Humphrey Clinker, and Roderick Random; and that Jane was reading the second volume of Bewick's Birds with its evocative vignettes in the introductory pages, an edition whose letter-press the ten-year-old Jane “cared little for” (14; vol. 1, ch. 1).

In The Poetry of Chartism (2009), Mike Sanders describes the temptation which confronts literary scholars of working-class and radical political movements to present their endeavors as “archival work [of] discovery, a bringing to light of long forgotten artefacts” (36). Such posture, though dramatic, is unwarranted in Sanders's view because a critical tradition beginning in the late nineteenth century has continued to republish, analyze, and appreciate the writing of Chartist poets. Yet, if the temptation persists (for students of radical poetry and fiction alike), it does so for reasons beyond the difficulties inherent in accessing literature printed in ephemeral newspapers by movements which suffered state persecution. New generations of scholars must “discover” the radical corpus anew because in a profound sense this corpus has not been integrated into broader literary history but has remained a separate tradition, found and lost again and again.