“‘The Omnipresent,’ said a Rabbi, ‘is occupied in making marriages.’ The levity of the saying lies in the ear of him who hears it, for by making marriages the speaker meant all the wondrous combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good and evil.” 1

— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon . . . Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best — making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius, and fetters the dead to the living. . . . All that surrounds him hastens to decay. . . . Your god is a masked Death.”2

— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S FIRST NOVEL found no publisher: her second one brought her editors and readers, money and success, society and scrutiny. With this muchness the subtlest theologian of Haworth Parsonage turned, all shy and fierce and willing, to grapple. Not for nothing is her third novel set in “the Hollows”: not for nothing are the avatars and objects of its quests named “Mo(o)re.” The Work Question, the Woman Question, the Church Question, the Fiction Question — all of these go to the making of Shirley in its plenitude, but at its heart is a metaphysical question, the fusion, the confusion, of “hollow” with “more.”3

His tall upright figure and quick penetrating glance indicate the man of energy and decision, and those who are most intimately acquainted with him know best that these qualities are combined with a large measure of kindliness and breadth of view, and a readiness to be of use to such as are brought into contact with him in official capacity and in private life. (Biograph 158)

IT IS MY PURPOSE to demonstrate that the above paragraph, published in 1880, is a description of the man who wrote My Secret Life, the man who called himself Walter. I shall be very little concerned with literary or psychological analysis. I intend simply to present the process of research which led me to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that I have discovered the identity of the author, then to summarize such biographical information as I have been able to obtain from contemporary sources or archival records, and to comment, where necessary, on the correspondences or differences between Walter’s narrative and the real man’s outer life.

MR. SWINBURNE, DECLARED THOMAS BAYNES in the Edinburgh Review, is a “poet of what is known as the sensational school of literature.” Swinburne’s predilection for sensuous subject matter, and the premium on physical sensation in his poetry, Baynes argued, produce in the reader neither “ideal pleasures” nor “any purely mental effect,” but a “physical commotion in the frame — a ‘flutter of the blood’” (93–94; 89–90).

AT THE END OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’SLady Audley’s Secret (1862), her hero- detective Robert Audley marries the near-identical sister of George Talboys, his one close friend since their days at Eton College years before. Throughout the novel, Braddon characterizes Robert as having effeminate mannerisms and a strong longing to be with George. She consciously makes him an alumnus of Eton College, which one contemporary critic cited as a prime example of “characteristic faults and virtues” of the entire public school system (Payne 35). One perceived “fault” of the public schools in particular was that homosexuality and homoeroticism were condoned among the boys, who were later expected to “become” heterosexual upon graduation. But Robert’s homoerotic urges do not disappear with his “purchase” of a heterosexual marriage at the novel’s end.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

WITH THESE WORDS THE NARRATOR of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda appears to invite readers to map Gwendolen Harleth’s psyche, to trace its history, the places it has been, and the events that appear to have been, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, erased from her memory. This passage is typical of the way that questions of identity in George Eliot’s last novel seem consistently to reflect emerging Victorian concepts of memory.

Probably as a direct result of the burgeoning interest in the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, we see at mid-century a general trend toward the empirical study of the mind according to the model used in the natural sciences: observation and taxonomical classification. Scientists thus observed the physical attributes and behaviors of individuals and then attempted to classify each within the larger species of humans and their behaviors. From this point, scientists would then speculate about the existence of general categories or even laws governing the functions of the mind. It comes as no surprise, then, that those writing most prolifically on physiology and psychology at mid-century also wrote important tracts about nature study: George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill among others. And, as other critics have noted before me, Eliot includes references to both types of science in her works.1

Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it?

— Gaffer Hexam, Our Mutual Friend

WHILE FISHING CORPSES out of the fast-flowing Thames, itself a symbol of death,1 in order to probe their pockets, Gaffer Hexam makes sharp reference to a long-standing distinction regarding the limits of earthly possession. Some of Dickens’s readers would have been quite ready to connect Gaffer’s remarks to Bunyan’s story of Christian’s exodus from the commerce and bustle of the earthly city and his crossing of the river of death that flows before the gates of the celestial city. Others might have considered the riverman’s musings as somehow referring to St. Paul’s saying that “the end of those things [wealth] is death” (qtd. in Welsh 59).2 In the presentation of Gaffer’s ghastly career, however, Dickens points out a dislocation from these earlier views: the riverman desecrates the “muffled human form” he finds just as he truncates (if not turns inside-out) what was once the afterlife’s principal judgment of the use of riches in this lower world (44; bk. 1, ch. 1). According to the text, Gaffer, in sharply dividing spiritual transactions from material ones, and the soul from his or her former possessions, only further mires himself in the “slime and ooze” of the commercial river (43; bk. 1, ch. 1), enabling decay to encroach more aggressively on life.

Introduction

BURIED AMONG ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S miscellaneous papers at the Beinecke Library (Yale) is a seemingly insignificant tailor’s bill made out to “R. L. Stevenson, Samoa” from Chorley, the tailor in Sydney (Australia). The bill lists such items as “1 pair of white serge tros.,” “1 pair of Bedford Cord riding tros.,” “and 3 pairs of pyjamas” (Figure 3). Not even his biographers have bothered to mention it.

WHEN ENGLISHWOMAN ANNA SEWELL died in 1878 of an indeterminate chronic illness, she left a modest note among her papers which read: “I have for six years been confined to the house and to my sofa, and have from time to time, as I was able, been writing what I think will turn out a little book, its special aim being to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses” (qtd. in Chitty 178). Published in 1877 just months before her death, the “little book” that Sewell wrote proved to be the sixth most popular work printed in the English language1; she entitled it Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse. Sewell’s sentimental tale charts the rise and fall of a beautiful thoroughbred gelding, Black Beauty, from the wholesome pastoral bliss of his early life on a landed estate to his ultimate degradation as a cab horse working the dirty, crowded streets of London. From among the many instances of physical abuse depicted in Black Beauty, Sewell isolates those incurred in the name of “Fashion” as the most pernicious, and her narrative passionately participates in what was at the time a heated public controversy: the application of the curb-bit and the bearing rein, two popular harnessing devices which held the horse’s head tightly erect, compelling the animal into contrived and painful postures for the purpose of appearances alone.

There is a delightful feeling when you are well mounted, that those who are casting admiring glances at your horse, will find your dress and “get-up” just as perfect in their way.

— Mrs. Alice Hayes, The Horsewoman, 1893

At no time are the beauties of the female form divine displayed with such witching grace, the faultless flowing lines so attractively posed, the tout ensemble so thoroughly patrician. But if there be one blot in the fair picture, the charm at once vanishes.

— E. Kerr, Riding for Ladies, 1895

THE VICTORIAN SIDESADDLE RIDING HABIT was a paradoxical garment. It was a fashionable anti-fashion statement, masculine and feminine, practical yet alluring. While on horseback, the fair equestrian shunned the lace, frills, and furbelows worn by her pedestrian sisters. Even when the bell-like silhouette produced by the crinoline skirt was at its greatest width, the essence of the horsewoman’s garb was a lean, understated, and almost masculine simplicity. She represented the epitome of cultivated elegance and cut a fine figure in her tailored habit and silk top hat. Clad in her severe attire, the horsewoman became a center of visual attention in Victorian England. Though she graced fewer pages than the traditional fashion plate, she put her stamp on paintings, photographs, and caricatures. Preceded by showy, colorful riding costumes and superseded by breeches, caught between the demands of Victorian femininity and rising feminism, the riding habit and the women who wore it were typical of and unique to their era. The modern horsewoman represents a turning point in the history of female dress. She adopted the first sports costume specifically designed for women and opened the way for the invention of other athletic garments like the bicycling suit. The riding habit’s combination of style and practicality launched the fashion for more gender-neutral, utilitarian garments and heralded the advent of the twentieth-century working woman’s uniform: the tailored suit.

WHY ARE JANE EYRE AND DOROTHEA BROOKE clad by their creators in “Quakerish” garb? The oppositional plainness and simplicity of Quakerish heroines have often been read as signs of classlessness and sexlessness.1 Plain and simple clothing seems, to both Victorian and contemporary eyes, part of the package of reticence, reserve, and repression associated with the evangelical wing of nineteenth-century dissenting sects.2 The typical sociological view of the function of dress within conservative religious groups holds that “strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body” (Arthur 1). The control of female sexuality and the restraint of desire would seem to be the core function of modest clothing. Then the plain dress of some of the liveliest heroines of Victorian fiction presents a puzzle that can be solved only by recuperating the meaning of that clothing for Victorians. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, nineteenth-century novels testify to the way that clothes “always correctly express character” (Feeding the Eye 12), but the meaning of particular articles of clothing or styles can slip away. Accurately reading the characters of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot thus requires careful interpretation of their dress, in this case reversing the conventional reading of their plain, modest, and simple style. This essay argues that Quakerish clothing expresses both a promise of spirited sexuality and an admonition about the class-crossing potential of the respectable female contained within it.

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.

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