Oliver Twist, the early novel which a twenty-five-year-old Charles Dickens published serially from 1837 to 1839, revised in the 1840s, and featured in the public readings he offered from 1867 until his death in 1870, might well have inspired the thirty-two-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson before he serialized his own first novel, Treasure Island, in 1882. There are, after all, remarkable similarities between the two texts. For each dramatizes a young boy's immersion in a counter-world headed by villains who defy the norms of a dubious patriarchal order. What is more, the strong spell that thieves like Fagin and Bill Sikes and pirates like Billy Bones and Long John Silver exert over the innocents they mesmerize infects readers of each narrative as well as viewers of their many cinematic adaptations. We thus face a quandary. Despite our empathy with little Oliver and with his adolescent counterpart Jim Hawkins, we may question each boy's reintegration into an order whose fissures have been radically exposed.

While addressing the Royal African Society, founded in honor of Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Edward Wilmot Blyden reflected on one of his more memorable experiences in Victorian England:

The fifteenth-century Florentine world that George Eliot studied and recreated in Romola (Cornhill Magazine, July 1862–August 1863) was characterized by the idea of love between males and the practice of sex between males. Same sex desire took various forms from the love of the older teacher for his pupil to the illegal but common practice of penetrating adolescent boys, for which many fifteenth-century Florentine men were prosecuted, particularly under the regime of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola (1494–98). The monasteries themselves constituted an intense, all-male community of voluntary celibacy. These various sexual behaviors co-existed with more visible heterosexual institutions and practices, from the often politicized arranged marriages of the wealthy elite to the casual coupling of the peasant classes.

The story – we might almost say legend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend a benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen of Oliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

In 1881 William Powell Frith (1819–1909) exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy in London titled For Better For Worse (1881; oil on canvas; Private Collection). It depicts a well-to-do wedding Frith had witnessed in Bayswater (Figure 3). The newly married couple are represented crossing the pavement on a red carpet, just about to step into a waiting carriage pulled close to the kerb. The audience for their departure comprises a broad mix of classes and types. In his own description of this work, Frith identified the bride and groom, the bride's family and friends arranged on the steps of the house, plus a crowd standing behind the red carpet that included street boys, a Jewish second-hand clothes seller, and a policeman. In the foreground, on the left, a family of beggars approach from the street, while on the right-hand side, with his back to the viewer, stands a figure identified by Frith as an Italian boy with a monkey (2: 209–10).

At New College, Oxford, Lionel Johnson had a reputation for sleeping past noon. On Monday, April 15, 1889, the sun was high overhead when he boasted in a letter to his friend Campbell Dodgson of his intimacy with the elusive Walter Pater, at whose London house he had spent the weekend: “I lunched with Pater, dined with Pater, smoked with Pater, went to Mass with Pater and fell in love with Pater” (Roseliep 148). That all of these friendly activities – lunching, dining, smoking, taking Communion, and perhaps even falling in love – entail opening one's mouth, or at least loosening one's lips, suggests a connection, in Johnson's eyes, between Pater's well-documented powers to charm his audience and the oral susceptibility of that audience. Getting to know the true Pater, Johnson implies, is an oral affair. His conversations with Pater, their meals, his very sense of Pater, linger on his lips. Teachers open our eyes. But Pater opens Johnson's mouth. One is tempted to dismiss the letter to Dodgson, who, like Johnson, was same-sex oriented, as youthful homoerotic banter: a campy projection of Johnson's own ambivalent and mercurial appetites. A year later, after all, in a letter to his friend Arthur Galton, Johnson recounts a “mid-day” visit he received at Oxford – whilst “lying half asleep in bed” – from Oscar Wilde, who “laughed at Pater” and “consumed all my cigarettes” (Holland and Hart-Davis 423). “I am in love with him,” Johnson declares.

The days have passed in which John Ruskin's scientific writings were deemed secondary and separate to his art, architecture, or politics, but his science still tends to be viewed predominately via the prism of his later natural history, with its characteristically virulent opposition to Darwin and materialism, and in relation to his application of typological exegesis to landscape study. I would argue that an approach is required that situates Ruskin's response to Darwin against the background of his entire career in scientific writing and that seeks to clarify the relationship between the various influences which informed his engagement with environment. While this article cannot pursue such an analysis in full, it outlines some key reasons for its necessity. Through examination of significant 1843 correspondence and related works, I will call in particular for a re-evaluation of the degree to which Ruskin engaged in modern scientific methods and approaches. In doing so, I will suggest that Ruskin's later anti-materialism did not represent a seamless continuation of a long-established attitude to science and nature, but something of a discontinuity, in which, faced with the implications of evolutionary theory, he attempted to reject not just Darwinism, but many of the elements that had made his own work in science distinctive, convincing, and attuned to modernity, materiality, and process.

There is a familiar critical narrative about the fin de siècle, into which gothic fiction fits very neatly. It is the story of the gradual decay of Victorian values, especially their faith in progress and in the empire. The self-satisfied (middle-class) builders of empire were superseded by the doubters and decadents. As Patrick Brantlinger writes, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230). And this late-Victorian anomie expressed itself in the move away from realism and toward romance, decadence, naturalism, and especially gothic horror. No wonder, then, that the 1880s and 1890s saw a surge of gothic fiction paranoiacally concerned with the disintegration of identity into bestiality (Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), the loss of British identity through overpowering foreign influence (du Maurier's Trilby, 1894), the vulnerability of the empire to monstrous and predatory sexualities (Stoker's Dracula, 1897), the death of humanity itself in the twilight of everything (Orwell's The Time Machine, 1895). The Victorian Gothic, thus, may be read as an index of its culture's anxieties, especially its repressed, displaced, disavowed fears and desires. But this narrative tends to overlook the Victorians’ concerns with the terrifying possibilities of progress, energy, and self-assertion. In this essay I consider two oppositions that shape critical discussions of the fin-de-siècle Gothic – horror and terror, and entropy and energy – and I argue that critics’ exploration of the Victorians’ seeming preoccupation with the horrors of entropic decline has obscured that culture's persistent anxiety about the terrors of energy. I examine mid- to late-Victorian accounts of human energy in relation to the first law of thermodynamics – the conservation of energy – in both scientific and social discourses, and then I turn to Richard Marsh's 1897 gothic novel The Beetle as an illustration of my point: the conservation of energy might have been at least as scary as entropy to the Victorians.

Florence Nightingale, who became a national heroine after the Crimean War, was the most popular subject in hagiographical collective biographies of women during the mid- and late-1850s. However, her life can be regarded as a resolute resistance to conformity with the ideal of womanhood in the Victorian era. She recognised the chasm between her popularity and reality:

The first major example in what would become a long line of popular pre-1914 British invasion-scare narratives was the inflammatory 1871 tale The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. Through its vivid depiction of a German invasion and conquest of Britain, this story was designed to serve as a warning to Britons about the necessity of securing the nation's defenses. The dramatic impact of this work on the Victorian reading public and the political culture of the era has been treated by a number of scholars, most notably I. F. Clarke. Yet little attention has been accorded to the reaction it elicited from the professional peers of its author, Lieutenant-Colonel George Chesney. This interdisciplinary essay – which joins the study of literature with military history and politics – seeks to shed new light on the circumstances surrounding this extraordinarily influential tale, as well as on the genre it popularized, in large part by examining its reception by British officers. It begins by describing the tale's prehistory and emergence into widespread popularity and then evaluates the work's reception within armed forces circles. Some of the most trenchant assessments of this literary text, it turns out, were delivered within the austere confines of the Royal United Service Institution, a body whose meetings functioned as the crucible in which British military and naval judgments were forged.

Shortly before C. R. Ashbee transplanted a hundred and fifty Cockneys to Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, in 1902 to form a utopian arts-and-crafts community, two other back-to-the-land settlements were also established, one located outside the market town of Stroud, a mere bicycle ride away from Ashbee and his guild. These Tolstoyan colonies – Purleigh, founded in 1896 in Essex, and Whiteway, founded in 1898 in the Cotswolds – fostered goals of fellowship and the simplification of life, as had been modeled by Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman in the United States and Edward Carpenter in Britain. Yet, whereas Ashbee was inspired by the model of William Morris and nostalgia for a pre-industrial England, English Tolstoyans looked not to craft, but to a less Aesthetic “bread labor” as a respite from modernity's corruption. Visiting Whiteway in 1904, Ashbee observed the Tolstoyans’ struggles to live off the land and commented, “they hold the other end of the stick we are ourselves shaping at Campden” (qtd. in MacCarthy 100). As his metaphor implied, both groups shared utopian aspirations, but Whiteway's settlers had sought the perfection of life from another vantage point and through other means. Ashbee regarded the austerity of their lives with distance and, as we will see, even with some distaste. Nevertheless, some features of the guildsmen's lifestyle at Chipping Campden mirrored those at Whiteway. This essay uses memoirs and fictions by C. R. Ashbee, his spouse, Janet Ashbee, and the Tolstoyans to disentangle the threads of “Aestheticism” and “simplification,” and to mark places of their conflation.

In one of the fictive dialogues from his 1872 book The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dispensed advice to any scholar planning to start a private library:

By the time the nineteenth century reached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations 94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.

The criticisms of society made by Thomas Hood in the poems he wrote in the years immediately prior to his death in 1845 are from a very particular stance. The poems specifically measure society against Christian values. Thus, Hood bewails how “Christian charity” should “hang your head” (“The Workhouse Clock” 63), or on its “rarity” (“The Bridge of Sighs” 43).The seamstress in “The Song of the Shirt” expresses disbelief that “this is Christian work” (16). The pauper in “A Pauper's Christmas Carol” muses over his treatment on “our Saviour's natal day” (2). The gin to which the beleaguered are driven is the “dram of Satan” and is drunk, “While Angels sorrow, and Demons grin” (“A Drop of Gin” 11, 72). In “The Lady's Dream” the neglectful attitude shown by society to its suffering members is damningly put alongside the Biblical reassurance that, “even the sparrow falls / Not unmarked of God” (“The Lady's Dream” 77–78). “The Lay of the Labourer,” as we shall see, also makes play with Scriptural references. In this Christian analysis of society's ills, the suffering and going wrong of society are the product of setting aside God's wisdom in the decrees He gives about how to organise human dealings.

The title of George Egerton's first collection of short stories, Keynotes (1893), announces a concern with the beginnings of sequences, the first principles from which larger patterns are orchestrated. The stories introduce premises from which new social and sexual relations may be engendered and individual existential choices made, a philosophical intent that harks back to the preoccupation in classical Greek thought with the nature of the Good Life and how to live it, which Friedrich Nietzsche renews for modern Western philosophy. Egerton's broad but nonetheless radical engagement with Nietzschean thought can be traced through the references she makes to the philosopher in Keynotes, which are widely credited with being the first in English literature. Indeed, such allusions are, as Iveta Jusová observes, “the most frequent literary reference[s] in Egerton's texts” (53). They were also recognised and mobilised against her by some of her earliest critics.

Published monthly from April 1860 until 1864, The Magdalen's Friend and Female Homes’ Intelligencer was a periodical with a very specific mission. Launched at the height of the mid-Victorian concern with prostitution – when institutions devoted to the reclamation of penitent prostitutes began to emerge across Britain – it only ceased publication after the sudden death of its editor, the Reverend William Tuckniss. In its opening issue, the editors describe their explicit purpose: “Christians and Philanthropists who are now labouring single-handed [in the cause of reclaiming prostitutes and fallen women] will here find a rallying point, where they may exchange words of encouragement and advice, and confer with others who are their Fellow-labourers in the same cause” (“Opening Address” 1.1 1–2). It was, then, a trade publication for a movement that had grown remarkably – seven years after its founding in 1853, the Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children (commonly known as the “Rescue Society”) was operating twelve houses of reclamation in London.

On November 16, 1918, a little more than two weeks after an armistice officially ended World War I, an editorial in the Idaho Statesman offered advice about the future of the world economy. Lifting the title of its editorial directly from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, or The Two Nations, the Statesman argued only the political philosophy espoused by that novel and its author could show the world a way forward. Quoting from the novel's final paragraph, the newspaper declares: “‘To be indifferent and to be young can no longer be synonymous.’ Those words were true when Disraeli penned them just 73 years ago, but they apply with striking force to the problems of today and to the problems which will be certain to develop in the years just ahead” (“Trustees of Posterity” 4). The newspaper wasn't only advocating political involvement by the nation's youth, nor was Disraeli. Sybil proposes a particular kind of economic and political order, a union between a “just” aristocracy, led by the young and ambitious, and the laboring classes. It proposes that great statesmen take up the mantle of responsibility just as Thomas Carlyle, in Disraeli's day, advocated great captains of industry take up that mantle (Houghton 328). The newspaper's argument implies this seventy-year-old British novel will be critical to America's political future. But this vision of responsibility belongs in the nineteenth century – it is rooted in the conflict between republicanism and aristocratic oligarchy – and the timing of the Statesman article at first seems wildly inappropriate. As the First World War ended, the Statesman expected the world would face the kind of threats Americans had perceived before the war. The editorial warns that “mobocracy” still “holds nearly half of the area of Europe and much of northern Asia in its bloody and irresponsible grip.” If there is any doubt about who is behind this “mobocracy,” the newspaper clears that matter up, answering: “Bolshevists, Socialists and all of the disciples of unrest who may be roughly grouped as ‘The Reds’” (“Trustees of Posterity” 4). And when the Statesmen warns about “Reds,” it can easily expect its readers to remember that, only seventeen years earlier, President McKinley had been shot by just such a “Red”: Leon Czolgosz, an alleged anarchist and the child of Polish immigrants.

The improbable course of Thomas Cooper's life (1805–1892) – from shoemaker and autodidact, to school teacher, to Methodist circuit rider, to Chartist activist, to prison poet, and finally to working-class lecturer and editor – encapsulates the tensions and contradictions of Victorian self-help. Fiercely devoted to projects of self-education and improvement, as an apprentice craftsman in Lincolnshire, Cooper memorized Hamlet and significant portions of Paradise Lost, and taught himself Latin, French, and some Hebrew. The publication of The Purgatory of the Suicides, the epic poem for which he is best known, made Cooper a minor celebrity in the world of middle-class literary reformers, who praised his artistic and educational accomplishments. The novelist and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley discerned in his heroic commitment to “the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties” an alternative to political militancy and loosely based Alton Locke, the story of a disillusioned Chartist hero's spiritual redemption, on Cooper's own life (Collins 3–4). Samuel Smiles, the Scottish reformer and author of Self-Help, celebrated Cooper's writing as part of a national culture which could help heal the country's social and economic divisions, arguing that his literary achievements placed him in “the same class as Burns, Ebenezer Elliot, Fox, the Norwich weaver-boy, to say nothing of the Arkwrights, Smeatons, Brindleys, Chantrys, and the like, all rising out of the labour-class into the class of the thinkers and builders-up of English greatness” (Smiles 244).

Such was George Orwell's vision of suburban life in his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air – a vision of mindless, middle-class consumerism teetering always on the edge of financial ruin – a domestic life-in-death. Over the course of the twentieth century, suburbia has become the topos of bourgeois complacency, the locus of psychic decline. Strange, then, to think that at the end of the nineteenth century, two of Europe's Decadent writers – Max Beerbohm and Joris-Karl Huysmans – could find in the suburbs of London and Paris an aesthetic retreat from the snares of bourgeois urban life. In 1884, Huysmans published Against Nature, the paragon of fin-de-siècle Decadent fiction which recounts the movement of the syphilitic aristocrat, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, from the centre of Paris to the suburban village of Fontenay-aux-Roses where he constructs his anti-bourgeois aesthetic hermitage. Over ten years later, in 1896, Beerbohm published his satirical essay “Diminuendo,” in which the twenty-four-year-old writer announces his retirement from the literary world and his subsequent retreat to a quiet life of aesthetic contemplation in a London suburb. Needless to say, these suburban havens are a far cry from Orwell's sordid account of pre-war suburbia's obsession with false teeth and life insurance. Though only a little over fifty years separate Against Nature and Coming Up for Air, the suburbs of Huysmans and Orwell seem worlds apart. No one could imagine Des Esseintes's leather-bound study in the “Hesperides Estates,” and it seems unthinkable to picture Beerbohm locking himself away in a library amidst the cacophony of squealing infants and nagging housewives. The suburbs seem the least likely place in which the Decadent or dandy might thrive, and yet in Against Nature and “Diminuendo,” Huysmans and Beerbohm depict the suburbs as the last refuge of the man of taste. How could this be? What are these fin-de-siècle suburbs of London and Paris, and what do they signify in Huysmans's and Beerbohm's writing? These are the central questions I pose in this study of the Decadents’ retreat from urban life.

In a letter that she wrote to her childhood governess and religious mentor Maria Lewis in 1839, George Eliot describes a pervading and distressful mental anxiety – one that would come to greatly influence both the constitution and development of her fiction. Still within the throes of her evangelical ardor, Eliot laments in this letter that the “disjointed specimens” of history, poetry, science, and philosophy have become “all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening every day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations” (Eliot, Letters 1: 29). The letter illustrates more the disjointed nature of Eliot's own mind than the disjointed nature of the things occupying it. Apparently under the weight of some religious guilt, she retracts this complaint and apologizes for it; but, then she immediately contradicts her retraction and defends her struggle by expanding her own individual failure into the larger realm of universal human failure: