FROM THE BEGINNING OF the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, the central issues in writing about the Victorian city have remained the same: how did the Victorians “see” the city? how do “we” see the Victorian city? and how do “we” see the Victorians seeing the city? Is the city knowable? What are the modes of representation of the Victorian city?

WHEN CLOTH OR CLOTHING made for a specific purpose in one cultural context begins to be produced as a commodity and is appropriated as fashion by a different culture, meanings reverberate on both sides of the transaction. The commercial traffic with India in the nineteenth century brought many such commodities into the homes of the English middle class. Some of these items, and particularly textiles, led a double life, functioning at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as markers of proper Englishness. If mid-Victorian novels may be said to have assisted in circulating and crystallizing, rather than merely reflecting, social norms among their readers, then the regularity with which certain Indian textiles and especially shawls reappear in these novels bespeaks their burgeoning importance both commercially and ideologically.

REVIEWINGTHE SCHOLARSHIP on Wilde in the last decade is a daunting task not only because of the large amount of recent work on Wilde, but because the ground is already occupied by two book-length surveys: Ian Small’s Oscar Wilde: Recent Research (which picks up where his 1993 Oscar Wilde Revalued left off) and Melissa Knox’s Oscar Wilde in the 1990s: The Critic as Creator. The reader, then, is referred to these volumes for their more comprehensive coverage. Here I will focus my discussion by borrowing what Small designates three “new paradigms” that emerged in the 1990s: the Gay Wilde, the Irish Wilde, Wilde and Consumerism — this last I will rename the Materialist Wilde. To these I will add a fourth category, again taking my cue from Small: Idealist Wilde. In each category I will use representative examples to reflect on the issues confronting these approaches to Wilde. Both Small and Knox evaluate as well as chronicle, though from different perspectives. Small believes work in the field should be better supported by empirical information — “facts” — about Wilde’s life, his career, and the period, and he thinks scholars need to consider whether the different “Wildes” they construct are compatible with each other (12–13). Knox favors a biographical approach to Wilde, saying explicitly that her survey “explores the forms of resistance to biography as well as its successful use in criticism of the l990s” (xv), and turning up more instances of resistance than success.1

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, edginess was experienced as a literal problem. The OED gives the first definition, occurring in 1822, as “the condition of having the outlines too clearly marked; angularity, hardness of outline.” This problem of unsightly outlines was solved, I suggest, by an extensive use of fringe throughout the Victorian period. These many miles of trimming performed symbolic work for a culture whose anxieties seemed to gather at edges — of clothing, of furniture, of nations, of empires, and eventually, of selves. A few inches of fringe, after all, can make an edge wide and irregular enough to allow for error. A row of pompoms strategically placed can usefully blur the beginnings and endings of literal and figurative fabric. A border of lace can protect edges from unraveling or wearing down. The fringed, and thus indefinite border, suggests the value of being able to imagine and construct limits as variable, permeable, and attenuated structures, rather than as hard edges at which one must stop short. The befringed edge offers a margin for error, for exploration, for coming to an end slowly and gradually.

Can fringe really mean anything, much less create symbolic space for working out conflicts that gather at boundaries, limits, and edges? I contend that fringe, like other debased aspects of material culture, can perform cultural work precisely because it doesn’t get taken seriously. Indeed, the debasement of fringe is part of what makes it interesting and significant.

IN RECENT TIMES, the covert yet insistent relation between aesthetics and political economy has claimed significant critical focus, for these two discourses have implicated and complicated each other in puzzling ways.1 In offering some background to this relation, Mary Poovey has traced the modern history of aesthetics and political economy to a common origin within the eighteenth-century field of moral philosophy.2 As a study in search of cultural cohesion, moral philosophy drew together a wide-ranging set of critiques including ethics, aesthetics, economics, and government. Then, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the field branched, Poovey tells us, shaping new categories of knowledge through such works as Edmund Burke’s Enquiry (1757) on aesthetics and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) on political economy. As these divisions in knowledge became further refined through discursive practice in the Victorian Age, aesthetics and political economy appeared to have little to do with each other; however, Poovey argues that “one way to remember the originary relationship between these two discourses — and to measure the toll exacted by their division — is to tease from each its past and present entanglements with gender” (“Aesthetics” 8). In this essay, I take up her call by examining the relation between aesthetics and political economy, as they inscribe their mediations on gender roles in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.

THE ANXIETY ABOUT BEING ill- or well-dressed that Margaret Oliphant evokes so vividly in this passage was particularly acute in the last half of the nineteenth century when changes in the clothes people wore reflected increasing class mobility. With the growth of a ready-to-wear clothing industry that made it more and more difficult to distinguish the bourgeoisie from the lower echelons of society, “dress became,” as Charles Blanc argued in 1872, “an image of the rapid movement that carries away the world” (qtd. in Benjamin 74). Alongside and as a result of this democratization of dress, a backlash occurred in which subtleties of dress became a means of reinforcing the very class distinctions that seemed to be vanishing in the late nineteenth century. As Rudolph von Jhering argued in 1869, “Fashion is the barrier — continually raised anew because continually torn down — by which the fashionable world seeks to segregate itself from the middle region of society” (qtd. in Benjamin 74). In Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Phoebe Junior, Thomas Hardy and Oliphant use fashion to explore the freedoms and limitations of late nineteenth- century class mobility by telling the story of heroines who are able, in part through education, to separate themselves from their lower-class roots, a separation that is marked in each case by a change in attire.

IN A WELL-KNOWN LETTER EXCHANGE of 1861, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, then aged fifty-five, responded to William Makepeace Thackeray’s rejection of one of her poems. In his capacity as Editor of the Cornhill magazine, the famous novelist and man of letters had seen fit to exercise his censorship prerogatives on material he considered highly inappropriate for his audience. This letter exchange, which may serve as a metonymy for the ideological crises in which Barrett Browning’s career was positioned from beginning to end, forcefully exposes not just literary values in crisis, but also authorship in crisis. In particular, the exchange exposes an enforced split between roles of the analytical poet and the domestic lady, a separation of roles which Barrett Browning’s career both publicly exposed and dramatically reworked, but could not entirely evade.1

IS THERE A VICTORIAN WRITER who has won as much attention in the last few years, critical or popular, as Oscar Wilde? One or two decades ago, Hardy, Dickens, and the Brontës were the Victorians that large numbers of people wanted to read, discuss, and see on film and stage. It seems like another era that saw Nicholas Nickelby ruling on the Great White Way. The decline of Dickens’s mass appeal was probably signaled some time ago with an episode of the TV series Law and Order in which a murder case resulted from a business feud over a disastrous Broadway production of Bleak House. The Brontës have fared no better; the musical Jane Eyre, after some of the worst reviews ever to have greeted a musical, recently closed on Broadway, its producers in its last weeks having resorted to advertising on milk cartons. Although Hardy reportedly continues to top the sales of nineteenth-century British classics, Michael Winterbottom’s 2001 film adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, set during the California Gold Rush, played to mixed reviews and nearly empty theaters, its gloomy fealty to the spirit of Hardy’s fiction, not unlike Winterbottom’s brooding version of Jude the Obscure, an evident obstacle for most audiences.

WHEN I WAS ASKED by the editors of Victorian Literature and Culture to write a review essay assessing current trends in what they called the field of Anglo-African literature, I was delighted but I was also a little skeptical. First, I wondered how they or I would define such a field. Second, I wondered whether the field was in fact so well-established as to embody its own set of trends as opposed to merely consisting of a bunch of people plugging away at their different pieces of work.

The Carnival is just over, and we have entered upon the gloom and abstinence of Lent. The first day of Lent we had coffee without milk for breakfast; vinegar and vegetables, with a very little salt fish, for dinner; and bread for supper. The Carnival was nothing but masking and mummery. M. Héger took me and one of the pupils into the town to see the masks. It was animating to see the immense crowds, and the general gaiety, but the masks were nothing.

—Charlotte Brontë, letter, March 6, 1843

. . . Humble as I [Pecksniff] am, I am an honest man, seeking to do my duty in this carnal universe, and setting my face against all the vice and treachery.

—Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44)

Women were playing [at cards and roulette]; they were masked, some of them; this licence was allowed in these wild times of carnival.

—Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–48)

OVER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Allon White acknowledged “the small army of literary critics now regularly describing modern cultural phenomena as ‘carnivalesque’” (109). Surprisingly, though, only advance scouting parties of carnivalesque critics have infiltrated the various war games, love feasts, slanging matches, “blood” sports, food fights, drinking bouts, carnal appetites, funferalls, body cultures, ludic acts of toasting, roasting, masking, mumming, and other folk and fair festivities — besides the recurring clowns, fools, rogues, tricksters, killjoys, and spoilsports — that significantly enliven and inform Victorian literature. When such critical forays have occurred, the role of the carnivalesque has often been contested, reflecting perhaps what White’s liminal reading of cultural history calls the nineteenth-century’s initial “‘disowning’ of carnival, and the gradual reconstruction of the concept of carnival as the culture of the Other” (102). And yet Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi still speaks eloquently for various Renaissance and Victorian writers when he proclaims that he is but “one” of many who “makes up bands/To roam the town and sing out carnival” (ll.45–46). Indeed, his double-voiced, pantagruelian aesthetic is to “go a double step,/Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,/Both in their order” (ll.206–08), for