The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.

Though there is now a vast body of work detailing Dickens's extensive interests in contemporary science, technology, and medicine, still there is an overriding sense that Dickens was in energetic contact with scientific knowledge but had no precise role in its constitution, creation, or contestation. In this essay, I argue instead that Dickens was one of the most powerful communicators of scientific knowledge in the mid-Victorian period. Drawing on James A. Secord's model of “knowledge in transit,” the idea that the content of scientific knowledge is arrived at at the same time as audiences for knowledge are constituted or imagined, I also argue that Dickens had a significant role to play in shaping the practices, objects, and values of scientific work. If we have lost sight of this Dickens, I argue, it is because the kinds of science he advocated and the power he wielded threatened other literary-scientific practitioners—including G. H. Lewes—who reshaped Dickens's reception in ways that suited their own aims and agendas. Dickens—a vocal exponent of mesmerists, spontaneous combustionists, sanitary campaigners, early-development hypothesizers, and fantastical engineers—had a far more direct and central role in scientific culture than has yet been understood.

Through a sustained close reading of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1855 novel The Newcomes, this essay examines three analogous types of particularity in the novel: the particularity of loved ones in the social network, of fictional persons in the literary work, and of the individual text. Drawing on recent sociological and network readings of Victorian narrative, I argue that Thackeray's plot about relationships in the marriage market is reflected (on the level of form) by the structural relation between characters and text, and (on the level of the reading experience) by the affective engagement of the reader to the novel. As characters encounter problems in replacing old relations (former lovers, deceased spouses, estranged relatives) with new ones, the novel raises analogous questions about the replaceability of characters as textual constructs or fictional persons, and of the novel itself as one experience among multitudes on offer in the nineteenth-century market. A tension between the continual or particular experience of an individual novel and the felt historical pressure of novels en masse registers in the text itself as a formal and narrative problem, one that leads us suggestively toward recent methodological debates about intimate and distant reading.

This article explores the representation of “plant horror” in fin de siècle “lost world” novels, from hideously dynamic carnivorous trees to mysterious plant-based drugs with the power to send their victims into torpid apathy. Such freakish flora can contribute to new understandings of the imperial romance novel, specifically in relation to its depiction of threatened masculinities. Combining modern ecocritical research into plant horror with readings of the imperial gothic, this article sheds new light on both fields by challenging the common assumption that both genres often associate the uncanny with moments of accelerated violence. Rather, I argue that these texts are instead most interested in questions of lassitude and stasis, and in problematizing the ideologies of conquest and control that animated British imperialism. Nuancing the ecophobia that is often identified with moments of plant horror, this article interprets nature not as phobic object but as sublimated metaphor for a specifically gendered anxiety. Encounters with the monstrous vegetal serve as an unsettling reminder that male bodies were ultimately disposable, controllable, and replaceable within the flawed economies of Victorian imperialism.

Scholarly discussions of the anonymous homoerotic novel Teleny (1893) invariably confront the question of its mysterious origins. This is understandable, since for many commentators what has been dubbed “the first gay modern novel” represents the opening chapter in a story about queer print culture that may (or may not) have been authored by Oscar Wilde. Joining the methodologies of bibliography and queer theory, with particular emphasis on temporal directionality and sequencing, this article offers new insight into Teleny's history in light of its virtually unknown 1899 prequel, Des Grieux (The Prelude to “Teleny”). “Des Grieux and the Origins of Teleny” represents the first detailed critical analysis of Teleny's literary progeny, and I pursue this analysis by attending to publishing history, authorial speculation, and both novels’ engagement with Victorian sexology. Although the bibliographer Peter Mendes avers that “Des Grieux was indeed written by the same hand(s) as Teleny, and possibly before Teleny at that,” I contend that its appearance six years after the first appearance of Teleny articulates a queer textual genealogy for the two novels, situating Teleny in an inverted relation to a prequel that postdates it.