In August 2013 the Canadian government launched its largest search for the ships, relics, and records of the John Franklin expedition, which disappeared with all 129 hands lost searching for the Northwest Passage in 1845. Canada's latest search was its fifth in six years, one of dozens of search expeditions launched since 1848, in a well-known story of imperial hubris elevated to an international cause célèbre. Recent work in nineteenth-century literary and visual culture has shown the significant role that Franklin played in the Victorian popular imagination of the Arctic (see Spufford, Potter, David, Hill, Cavell, Williams, Savours, MacLaren). In panoramas, stereographs, paintings, plays, music, lantern shows, exhibitions, and popular and elite printed texts, record numbers of Britons could enjoy at their leisure the Arctic sublime in which Franklin's men perished. Alongside this work on how Europeans represented Arctic peoples and places, we also have a growing body of Inuit oral histories describing their encounters with nineteenth-century Arctic explorers. Drawing on these traditional histories of British exploration, visual culture, and literary imagination, and on postcolonial, anthropological and indigenous accounts that shift our attention away from the Eurocentrism of exploration historiography, and toward the “hidden histories of exploration,” this essay uncovers an unexamined material dimension of these encounters – the “Franklin Relics” collected by voyagers searching for Franklin.

As we planned this special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, the editors of VLC and I engaged in a lively exchange – what title could capture such a sprawling arena of concern? Victorian India seemed short and sweet. And yet one must ask, which Victorian India? Whose Victorian India? Do we mean India and Indians in the British Isles? British traders, soldiers, and administrators in Britain or Indian subjects across the subcontinent? What about an imagined Britain in India? An imagined India in Britain? The essays collected here represent varied answers to these questions. They also chart the recent parameters of what Albert Pionke calls in his essay “the epistemological problem of British India.” Before returning succinctly to the baker's dozen articles assembled here – for readers will want to encounter them without unnecessary commentary – I turn to the conjoined issues animating both these essays and much recent work on British imperialism: issues of historiography and epistemology.

Belle vue zoo, founded in 1836, both celebrated and replicated the industrial surroundings of Manchester. Looking at the Zoo from a distance, people in the mid-nineteenth century would have remarked upon the establishment's dazzling grounds, illuminated either by Belle Vue's own gas works or by the electricity powered by its robust generators. They also would have caught sight of the zoo's buildings, humming with the action of the steam-driven machines within. By utilizing the most up-to-date technology, Belle Vue was an extension of its neighboring manufacturing city.

Blanche Warre Cornish's 1921–22 tripartite memoir, “Memories of Tennyson,” begins in 1869 when she meets the poet by way of her parents’ friendship with Tennyson's neighbor, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (145) (Figure 1). The photograph that Cornish recalls as “psychophotography” is one instance of a trend in Victorian England of spirit photography that was first practiced around 1872 after it was imported from America, where William Mumler had developed it (Tucker 68; Doyle 2: 128). Reactions to these spirit photographs took various forms: while some viewers regarded them as a credible medium for communication with the dead, their detractors saw them as deliberate acts of deception. Others employed photography's spectral qualities for entertainment, such as the London Stereoscopic Company that had marketed photographs of angels, fairies, and ghosts for their customers’ amusement in the 1860s (Chéroux 45–53). By the time the “shadowy figure of a man” appears beside Arthur Hallam's erstwhile fiancé, Mrs. Jesse, Tennyson's sister, the practice had been subject to public intrigue and scandal as a part of broader and contentious Victorian debates about the status of photography as art or document. The already surreal qualities of Cornish's anecdote are amplified by Tennyson's question, “Is that Arthur?,” which entertains the possibility of Hallam being present in a visible, spectral form while unrecognized by his beloved friend.

Susan L. Ferguson shows how Victorian novelists used the reported speech of their characters to create a “ficto-linguistics” wherein “the systems of language that appear in novels . . . indicate identifiable alternative patterns congruent to other aspects of the fictional world” (1). These novels present self-contained systems, she says, in which “speech relates in style as well as content to the speech of other characters, [and] all quoted language in a novel is contained within and potentially interacts with the language of the narrator” (1). Ferguson's interpretation of novelistic speech enables more convincing analyses of reported dialect speech than earlier efforts, which compared them directly to real-life dialects – a tendency that itself reflects the “grand narrative” of “authenticism” (Sanchez-Arce) – and which assumed that discrepancies and inconsistencies were stylistic weaknesses due, for instance, to over-sentimentality or “lowness” (Quirk 5), or to the writer being reluctant to depict virtuous characters as speaking non-standard English, regardless of the likelihood or possibility that characters from badly educated backgrounds would speak anything else.

At the heart of Dickens'sDombey and Son (1846–48) is a woman who is both the central problem that the narrative seeks to manage and its solution to that problem. Florence's position as heiress to Dombey and Son enables her entry into the marketplace as an independently wealthy woman who disrupts the patriarchal transmission of property and money. Dombey and Son diverts attention from Florence's position as heiress by providing a sentimental lesson on the economic importance of the domestic woman, who grounds intrinsic value and is essential to the reproduction of the patriarchal family and economy. Dombey's domestic and financial failures, the novel would have us believe, stem from his initial devaluation of Florence and overvaluation of Paul. Hence, at the novel's close, Dombey learns that the foundation of the family and firm is not a son but “a Daughter after all.” Dickens thus presents Florence's intrinsic value and inalienability as the resolution to the very problem of alienability and unstable values that her position as heiress encodes. Yet this lesson regarding Florence's value conceals the novel's central anxiety, what Robert Clark refers to as “the arbitrary taboo on women's participation in the economic order” (73). If the novel accords insubstitutable value to the domestic woman as the keystone of the family and economy, it does so to dramatize the threat posed to patriarchal structures of kinship, property, and capitalist expansion if all women were to enter the marketplace and become, in a sense, heiresses.

First published in The Phantom Rickshaw (1888), the fifth volume in A. H. Wheeler & Co.'s “Indian Railway Library” series, “The Man Who Would Be King” may be the best and is almost certainly the last story that Rudyard Kipling wrote while still living in India. It is, then, the culmination of an annus mirabilis that saw its twenty-three-year-old author publish six books, albeit short ones, and achieve widespread fame in India. He also garnered sufficient acclaim in England that he would decide to resign his editorial position at George Allen's two Anglo-Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer, in favor of a literary life in London. In light of these biographical facts, readers might reasonably expect the story to offer a summative, even authoritative, conclusion about life and empire on the subcontinent that Kipling had represented so abundantly all year.

Midway through the old curiosity shop (1840–41), Quilp returns home to discover his own wake in progress upstairs. He has been absent for three days, dogging the footsteps of the friends and family searching for Nell: materializing at Little Bethel, the chapel Kit's mother attends, or rising from the larder of the inn to which the single gentleman and Kit's mother retire after discovering from Mrs. Jarley that they have just missed Nell. Quilp's wife, having heard nothing from him all this time, has concluded that he has drowned, and so Quilp finds her, her mother, and the lawyer Sampson Brass at work on a descriptive advertisement for his corpse. As Quilp looks on, the group insultingly anatomizes him – “Large head, short body, legs crooked” (Dickens 382; ch. 49) – a process punctuated by the slightly inebriated Brass's musings on the afterlife to which the dwarf might have flown. Brass considers the possibility that the recently deceased might be at that moment watching from the next world, and this thought leads to another platitude about the dead:

During his third expedition into the higher Himalaya in 1866, the most ambitious of his three journeys into the mountains, Samuel Bourne trekked to the Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganges. At that site he took “two or three negatives of this holy and not altogether unpicturesque object,” the first photographs ever made of the glacier and the ice cave called Gomukh, meaning the cow's mouth, from which the river emerges (Bourne 96). These words of Victorian India's pre-eminent landscape photographer, importantly, highlight the coming together of the picturesque mode and the landscape form through the medium of photography. In this essay, I focus on Samuel Bourne's images of the Himalaya, produced between 1863 and 1870, to query the ideological power of this triangulation to produce a specific image of the mountains in late nineteenth-century Victorian India. Situating Bourne's images in relation to contemporaneous material practices of the British within the space of the Himalaya, namely, the establishment of hill stations as picturesque locales in the higher altitudes of the Indian subcontinent, I argue that the landscape form, the picturesque mode, and the photographic medium, inflect each other to tame the sublimity of the mountains by representing them as similar to the Alps.

This essay examines the floral telegraph; A New Mode of Communication by Floral Signals, a rare Victorian novel published anonymously in 1836 and reprinted in 1850 with a new tagline – The Floral Telegraph; Or, Affection's Signals. The reprint includes an ascription to Captain Frederick Marryat, Royal Navy (1792–1848) (See Figure 5). The majority of Marryat's biographers, scholars, and archivists have doubted the posthumous ascription. Here, I challenge the critical consensus and argue that Marryat did indeed write The Floral Telegraph published in 1836 and that the attribution of 1850 is correct. I begin with a biographical sketch of Marryat, a brief synopsis of the novel, and a review of its scant, mostly skeptical reception. I then argue that the “floral code” presented in the text resembles (albeit through parody) Marryat's famous codebook for maritime flag signals and that the Captain's acknowledged interest in botany and horticulture gave him the fluency necessary to create the Table of Flowers (See Figure 6). In addition, Marryat had a strong relationship with the novel's publisher, Saunders and Otley, and he was the editor of the Metropolitan, a literary magazine which ran a favorable review shortly after The Floral Telegraph was first published. The narrative also reflects Marryat's stylistic tendency to satire and parody and his ideas about literacy and widespread publication seem to be inversely reflected in the ironic digressions of the unreliable narrator, Horace Honeycomb, and the diatribe against the “cursed and abominable art of Printing” (117) offered by the inventor of the floral code, Floribel. I conclude my essay by viewing The Floral Telegraph as representative of early Victorian issues of literacy, affect, and disembodied, long-distance communication in the age immediately preceding the advent of the electromagnetic telegraph.

As Tennyson's “little Hamlet,”Maud (1855) posits a speaker who, like Hamlet, confronts the ignominious fate of dead remains. Maud's speaker contemplates such remains as bone, hair, shell, and he experiences his world as one composed of hard inorganic matter, such things as rocks, gems, flint, stone, coal, and gold. While Maud's imagery of “stones, and hard substances” has been read as signifying the speaker's desire “unnaturally to harden himself into insensibility” (Killham 231, 235), I argue that these substances benefit from being read in the context of Tennyson's wider understanding of geological processes. Along with highlighting these materials, the text's imagery focuses on processes of fossilisation, while Maud's characters appear to be in the grip of an insidious petrification. Despite the preoccupation with geological materials and processes, the poem has received little critical attention in these terms. Dennis R. Dean, for example, whose Tennyson and Geology (1985) is still the most rigorous study of the sources of Tennyson's knowledge of geology, does not detect a geological register in the poem, arguing that by the time Tennyson began to write Maud, he was “relatively at ease with the geological world” (Dean 21). I argue, however, that Maud reveals that Tennyson was anything but “at ease” with geology. While In Memoriam (1851) wrestles with religious doubt that is both initiated, and, to some extent, alleviated by geological theories, it finally affirms the transcendence of spirit over matter. Maud, conversely, gravitates towards the ground, concerning itself with the corporal remains of life and with the agents of change that operate on all matter. Influenced by his reading of geology, and particularly Charles Lyell's provocative writings on the embedding and fossilisation of organic material in strata in his Principles of Geology (1830–33) volume 2, Tennyson's poem probes the taphonomic processes that result in the incorporation of dead remains and even living flesh into the geological system.

Elizabeth Gaskell undertook the writing of The Life of Charlotte Brontë with a highly specific purpose in mind: it was meant, first and foremost, as a defense. Spurred by the urgings of longtime family friend Ellen Nussey, who was despairing over “the misrepresentations and the malignant spirit” at work in recent commentaries about the late author of Jane Eyre, Patrick Brontë had written to Gaskell only three months after his daughter's untimely death in 1855 and expressed the hope that an “established Author” like herself might produce a biography of Charlotte Brontë immediately. Gaskell was thus charged with the work of presenting to the world a definitive account of the celebrated, if enigmatic, writer's life, in defiance of the inflammatory and rumor-filled posthumous reports that were circulating.

Five chapters after the famous foggy opening of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), the novel's protagonist Esther Summerson disappears into thick air. Esther's “darling,” the young orphan Ada Clare, first discloses her companion's climatic dissolution when she celebrates her kind-hearted treatment of the hapless Jellyby children. Although Ada and Esther's guardian John Jarndyce maintains that a shower of “sugar-plums, or three-cornered raspberry tarts,” might be a suitable remedy for the children's neglect, Ada contradicts this proposition when she makes the odd claim, “It did better than that. It rained Esther” (61). This assertion that Esther's precipitated personhood is a “better” palliative than an abundance of sugared confections undoubtedly evinces Ada's childlike appreciation of her companion's effusive goodness. Within the larger scope of the novel, however, the remarkable notion that Esther's seemingly embodied actions and emotions are equivalent to rain, raises an unexpected but essential question: To what ends does Dickens's protagonist evaporate into the dense atmosphere we traditionally associate with the setting of Bleak House?

With its biting portrait of mid-Victorian greed, foolishness, and the obsessive pursuit of wealth, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now is often read as both a eulogy for traditional English society and an attack on rapacious capitalist values, particularly as they manifest themselves in the market for finance capital. Indeed, in the novel, the market mechanism seems to have run amok: social status, titles, and reputations circulate like commodities in a sea of new money that swamps traditional distinctions between creditworthiness and social capital, investment and speculation, and commerce and graft. The pervasive sense that everything has its price extends to intimate social relations, including courtship and marriage. Penniless, pretty women of good families, such as Julia Triplex (later Lady Monogram) and Lady Carbury, much like penniless, titled men such as Lord Nidderdale and Lady Carbury's handsome son Felix, recognize that, for them, marriage is a business arrangement in which the pretense of sentiment between the parties is little more than a social convention. Yet, the novel also suggests that the frenzy that free-for-all market forces have unleashed will exhaust itself, just as the speculative price bubble in railway shares central to the narrative eventually collapses. Countering its satire of capitalist excess is the novel's more optimistic treatment of exchange, which implies that fraud in the share market can be contained through the imposition of standards of behavior that foster honest commerce.

In The Empire of Nature John M. MacKenzie suggests there were “three animals in India with which the British had a special hunting relationship, the tiger, the elephant and the pig” (179). Of these, the tiger is the one most closely associated with Britain's imperial relationship with India. By the mid nineteenth century, as Joseph Sramek explains, “tigers . . . had become invested with several potent meanings” (659). Several critics including Sramek and Annu Jalais demonstrate how tigers were closely associated with Indian rulers, and, at the same time, with all that was wild and untamed about the subcontinent. Thus “[o]nly by successfully vanquishing tigers would Britons prove their manliness and their fitness to rule over Indians” (Sramek 659). Through close readings of selected tiger images from the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper considers the way tigers were consistently used as visual signifiers of India in a series of stock-in-trade images which depict tiger hunts, white men protecting white women from tigers, and tigers menacing Indians.

When the 1851 census reported an “excess” of some half-million women in Britain, feminists and anti-feminists quickly took to the press to debate the implications of the demographic imbalance. Yet Victorian novelists also wishing to convey and alter the “Condition of England” experienced something of a quandary: How should fiction respond to news of the imbalance, and what options could be suggested for resolving it?

Thomas Hardy came to the writer’s life with prodigious endowments and little self-confidence. His struggle with this unlikely predicament shows up repeatedly in his career, but nowhere so often as in its early stages. The “Studies and Specimens” Notebook, completed in the mid-1860s, bears touching witness to the labor of a greatly gifted writer teaching himself the very rudiments of literary form. The editors of the notebook speak accurately of the “diligence and doggedness” of his striving (Dalziel and Millgate xv). At the time his striving was dedicated to mastering poetry, the first and always most favored of his muses. But in 1867 “under the stress of necessity” he shifted his focus to “a kind of literature in which he had hitherto taken but little interest – prose fiction” (Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 58). With varying results he turned to writing novels, still testing his vocation until 1873 when he published A Pair of Blue Eyes, which, together with his impending marriage, fixed his literary course for decades to come.

In March of 1861, Thomas Henry Huxley was regularly drawing crowds of six hundred working-class men to Piccadilly for his Thursday night anatomy lectures. In a letter to his wife, Huxley reported that his evolutionary message was a success: “By next Friday evening they will all be convinced that they are monkeys” (L. Huxley, ed. 1: 205). Two years later, the notes from these lectures would make up the core of his popular work of comparative anatomy, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.

The first English language newspaper in India began publication in 1780; by 1857, almost two hundred papers and periodicals had appeared – and many had quickly disappeared. An 1839 article in the Calcutta Literary Gazette partially attributed this high mortality rate to a lack of talented writers and to a desire among colonists for news from England:

In the opening passage of A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf catches herself, and is subsequently caught out, in a moment of reflection on the banks of a river, within the grounds of a barely fictionalised “Oxbridge University”: