WITH AMPLE SELECTIONS FROM contemporary family letters, the sixth chapter of E. M. Forster's Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography (1956), entitled “Deceased Wife's Sister,” narrates the story of “a fantastic mishap” that the members of his grandparents' generation “could only regard as tragic” (189). After the death of his first wife, Harriet, in 1840, Henry Thornton decided to take another – Harriet's younger sister Emily – and at once, “the situation became very awkward” (190). Having lived with Henry all her life, his sister Marianne “behaved civilly” (190) to Emily Dealtry, who “had continued to frequent the house” after Harriet's demise, helping “to look after her nephew and her nieces” (189), but another Thornton sister, Isabella, “refused to see her anywhere” (190). Spending “vast sums” without success “in trying to get the 1850 bill passed” (192) – a bill that would have repealed the 1835 statute invalidating all such future marriages – Henry closed up the family home and took Emily, her mother, and his own daughters abroad to solemnize the marriage in one of the many European states where these unions were legal. Appalled, the rest of his nine siblings, most of them married, worked to maintain a united front. Upon Henry and Emily's return to England, they prevailed upon the susceptible Marianne to stay away from Battersea Rise, the family home: even “a single visit” from her, Forster's clerical grandfather insisted, “will be magnified into countenance and approval by a leading member of the family: and every artifice be employed to draw others in …. In the mind of society the family may become mixed with the offenders: and real injury be done without any resultant benefit” (214). By this act on the part of “the Master, the Inheritor, who had betrayed his trust,” Forster characterizes the other members of the family as “excluded for ever” from their ancestral home “unless they bent the knee to immorality, which was unthinkable” (205). Marking his own distance from Thornton family values, Forster comments, “to the moralist, so much discomfort will seem appropriate. To the amoralist it will offer yet another example of the cruelty and stupidity of the English law in matters of sex” (210).

IN THE PREFACE TO HER twenty-five volume series of novellas, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–33), Harriet Martineau advertises her attempt to popularize the emergent science of political economy. However, at the same time that she justifies her plan to illustrate various principles of political economy through her use of narrative form, Martineau goes further, arguing for the global scope and significance of this contested and often misunderstood new science. Toward the close of her preface, she writes:

Here, we had better stop, though we have not told half that might be related on the subject of buttons. It is wonderful, is it not? That on that small pivot turns the fortune of such multitudes of men, women, and children, in so many parts of the world; that such industry; and so many fine faculties, should be brought out and exercised by so small a thing as the Button.

—“What There Is in a Button,” Harriet Martineau (1852)

POSTCOLONIAL READINGS OFJane Eyre have often highlighted the historical occlusion of West Indian slavery in the novel. Carl Plasa, for instance, argues thatPenny Boumelha points out that by her reckoning there are “ten explicit references to slavery in Jane Eyre. They allude to slavery in Ancient Rome and in the seraglio, to the slaveries of paid work as a governess and of dependence as a mistress. None of them refers to the slave trade upon which the fortunes of all in the novel are based” (62). While Jane Eyre's allusion to slavery in the seraglio is indeed the most precise historical allusion in the novel, critics working with general schemes of slave and imperial history have not been able to identify or unpack its topical reference to an anomalous moment in the history of British abolition of slavery. Like all of Jane's references to slavery, however, this allusion gains considerably in importance when read against that history, as I will demonstrate in this essay. I will also elaborate the generic and more broadly historical intertextuality of Jane's Gothic narratives of identification with the slave. By doing so, I disclose further meanings of slavery and empire in Jane Eyre, as well as the ways in which Gothic and heroic modes become a means, for Brontë and her characters alike, of articulating fraught racialized identifications and disavowals. Jane's growth of religious feeling, which Barbara Hardy has influentially suggested is taken “for granted” rather than demonstrated (66), is, I argue, grounded in her consciousness of the tensions between slavery and Christianity as they are played out in domestic and imperial spheres at a particular historical moment. That historical moment may be established through Brontë's allusions to slave rebellions and charters, and to a particular edition of Sir Walter Scott's poem Marmion.

“One of the very worst books of that abominable class!” exclaimed the old lawyer, opening at the coloured frontispiece, from which brazen Miss Random smiled bewitchingly out, as if she had no doubt of captivating Time and all his veterans on a fair field. “Pah!” he shut her to with the energy he would have given to the office of publicly slapping her face.

—George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Promiscuous adj. 1. Consisting of diverse and unrelated parts or individuals; confused. 2. Lacking standards of selection; indiscriminate. 3. Indiscriminate in sexual relations. 4. Casual; random. [Latin promiscuus, mixed: pro (intensifier), thoroughly + miscere, to mix.]

—American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

IT IS WELL KNOWN that both traditional, historically orientated, literary criticism and new-critical studies were inseparable from a belief in the “unity” of meaning – a belief in the existence, below the multicolored surface of the literary text, of a single semantic center, which unifies the text and turns it into an “organic whole.” Similarly, Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists, though critical of the notion of the “organic whole” and its use in art criticism by the Neo-Romantics and the Symbolists, never questioned the alleged semantic unity of the literary text. An alternative approach to the problem of meaning was developed in the early books of Michel Foucault and conceptualized in his Archeology of Knowledge; he described meaning as “dispersal” and “dissemination.” A little later, in Dissemination and On Grammatology, Jacques Derrida radicalized Foucault's position by questioning the existence of clear-cut boundaries for Foucault's semantic “dissemination,” and he applied this notion in both philosophy and literary criticism. The resultant polemics between the two major approaches to the problem of the organization of meaning in the literary text caused the extreme polarization of literary studies; moreover, this polemics was often based on the tacit assumption that there exist only these two possibilities of the formal description of such organization: it should be described as either “unity” or “dissemination.” At the same time, from the logical, a priori, point of view, these terms describe only the poles of possible organization of meaning; moreover, practical criticism tends to show that both pure “unity” of meaning and its pure “dissemination” are very rarely found in literary texts. Thus, it seems to me, that those scholars who work in the field of literary criticism and cultural theory should attempt to create more complex and more precise models of the organization of meaning, which will transcend the dichotomy of “unity” and “dissemination.” One of these such models, the model of “semantic counterpoint,” is described and exemplified in this paper.

“… of Night, but not of Sleep” James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night

JAMES (BV) THOMSON'S insomnia is well documented. Bertram Dobell's memoir of the poet makes several mentions of it, as do critics of his work such as Robert Crawford, Edwin Morgan, and William Sharpe. Although widely acknowledged and noted as a significant biographical detail by critics, Thomson's insomnia has not been examined in terms of its relation to the specifically apocalyptic tone in some of his work. It is this curious relationship and its implications for the reading of his long poem The City of Dreadful Night which form the focus of this paper.

I accepted his invitation; but having once begun to dance, he would on no account be prevailed on to cease. At last I grew uneasy. I fixed my eyes upon him with anxiety; it seemed to me as if his eyes grew dimmer and dimmer, his cheeks paler and more wasted, his lips shrivelled and skinny, his teeth grinned out, white and ghastly, and at last he stared upon me with bony and eyeless sockets.

—“The Dance of Death,” Blackwood's Magazine It is ill dancing with a heavy heart.

—George Eliot, Mill on the Floss

OFFICIALLY, BRITAIN WAS a reluctant coloniser in the Pacific. Unwilling to take on the expense and responsibility of colonial administration, or to interfere with the imperial ambitions of other European powers in the region, successive British governments in the nineteenth century turned down offers of protectorates and other opportunities to colonize Pacific lands. But the energies and ambitions of individual British subjects were not similarly constrained, and the many who went to the Pacific to evangelize, to plant, and to trade established a strong unofficial British presence in the region. Acts of private colonization and a range of quasi-colonialist activities by Britons eventually forced their government to alter imperial policy and take on island protectorates and colonies, but except for the annexation of Fiji in 1874, this did not begin to happen until the late 1880s. For most of the century, Britain contented itself with passing a series of laws which attempted to control what its subjects did on the other side of the world, while minimizing responsibility for the administration of colonies.

ROSA CAMPBELL PRAED left Australia for London in 1876. In the decade or so subsequent to her arrival in the metropolis she forged a successful career as a writer of occult-inspired novels that drew on both theosophical doctrine and a nineteenth-century tradition of popular fiction that included Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. A string of novels published in the 1880s and the early 1890s, including Nadine: the Study of a Woman (1882), Affinities: A Romance of Today (1885), The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of Today (1886), and The Soul of Countess Adrian: A Romance (1891), produced a sort of popular aestheticism that melded an interest in fashionable society, a market-oriented Gothicism, and speculations on the philosophy of art that were indicative of Praed's relationship to a fin-de-siècle Bohemia and its literary circles. There is no doubt that these novels can be located in terms of the numerous popular genres – the art novel, the aesthetic novel, the occult novel – that form the literary background to much better known texts such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker's Dracula and George du Maurier's Trilby. But to account for Praed's ephemerality in terms of a series of generic categories elides too easily the pressures – economic, political, and aesthetic – impinging on a colonial, female novelist quickly forging a career at the centre of an imperial culture. Praed's novels are hybrid, polysemic creations, over-determined by these pressures, which in turn, no doubt, have contributed to her invisibility in contemporary literary studies. Their Gothicism and their appropriation of theosophical doctrine are both manifest in themes like mesmerism, telepathy, duel personality, and the recurring figure of the spiritual or “moral vampire.” Yet these obviously commercial novels are also intensely invested in aesthetic questions, in the dislocated character of imperial experience, in the accrual of cultural capital, and in their own relationship to the vexed question of their originality vis-à-vis the market for popular fiction.

BOOKS ARE SOMETIMES published posthumously. In the nineteenth century, books were occasionally written posthumously when spiritualist mediums claimed to receive communications from the spirits of famous writers anxious to keep in touch with their public from beyond the grave. Oscar Wilde wrote his last book twenty-six years after his death, Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages (1926), edited by Hester Travers Smith, the medium who received the messages while in trance and inscribed them through the process known as “automatic writing.” The book was highly regarded in the spiritualist community, boasting a preface by Sir William Barrett, a famous physicist, a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and – along with a number of other illustrious men of science such as physicists Sir William Crookes and Oliver Lodge as well as biologist Alfred Russell Wallace – a convert to spiritualism.

“I READ THE PAPERS and have a little political world of my own.” So Margaret Harkness confided to her second cousin Beatrice Potter (who would later marry the Fabian Sidney Webb) in a letter sent in February 1880 (qtd. in Hapgood 130). Subsequently disavowed by her repressive father, an Anglican priest, because she was insufficiently subordinate to him, Harkness was still living at home at this time. Her social isolation, as well as her political frustration, is palpable. But if the tone of this apparently resigned statement is poignant, it is at the same time too defiant to be dismissed as self-pitying. Later in the 1880s she worked among the poor and unemployed in the East End of London, the environment that she explored in some seven novels written under the pseudonym “John Law,” from A City Girl (1887) to George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905). In this decade she also circulated, uneasily enough, in the Social Democratic Federation, a socialist organization dominated by the acolytes of Friedrich Engels, vainly searching for a progressive model of friendship that might alleviate her sense of alienation. Indeed, Harkness became a formidable activist as well as an impressive novelist. She seems however to have grown disillusioned with socialist politics in the 1890s and to have drifted into philanthropic activities instead (see Ledger 144).

THE NEW WOMAN was both a discursive formation and a figure produced by materialist history as a result of debates over marriage, sexualities, political rights, labor conditions, life styles, and fashion. Unnamed until 1893 (Tusan 169), the “New Woman” became a lively topic in the press only in 1894 (Schaffer, “‘Nothing’” 39–40), at which point the rhetoric aimed at actual women quickly transformed into attacks on or defense of a literary phenomenon – in part, Ann Ardis suggests, because a literary controversy was less threatening than the prospect of actual social change (12). The “‘props’” attributed to the New Woman by Punch, the preeminent periodical to construct the literary stereotype, included five defining activities: “She smoked, rode a bicycle, frequented women's clubs, read voraciously and wore bloomers” (Miles 247). Scholars have long acknowledged that the New Woman did not suddenly appear but had a pre-history dating back to the 1880s (e.g., Ledger 23). A crucial part of that pre-history in life and in print was the founding of the “Literary Ladies,” a women writers' dining club, in 1889. The club not only represented significant innovation in fin-de-siècle authorship but also, more crucially, precipitated in the press the “props” (bloomers excepted) that would typify – and target – the New Woman from 1894 onward.

ELIZABETH GASKELL SCHOLARS are well aware of the anger that Mary Barton evoked in some quarters of Manchester's industrial bourgeoisie. These scholars are also certainly familiar with the central document of this anger, a wide-ranging critique in which an anonymous “Correspondent” of the Manchester Guardian accuses the anonymous novelist not only of ignorance but also of distortions that amount to “a libel on the masters, merchants, and gentlemen of this city.” The correspondent, W. R. Greg, offers several lines of argument in support of this charge. I would like to take one of these as the opening evidence in my own argument. “In a truthful ‘tale of Manchester, or factory life,’” he remarks, “it appears very strange that no notice whatever is taken of what has been done by the masters for improving the condition of the workmen”; instead of “mechanics' institutions,” “libraries founded expressly for [the workers'] benefit,” and other “institutions [where] every stimulus is given to self-culture, to the expansion of the mind … to whatever will elevate the taste, refine the manners, [and] improve the moral character,” the reader sees only the harsh effects of “comparatively uneducated and ignorant” factory masters. The author of Mary Barton, Greg asserts, may be counted among “the hosts of humanity-mongers” who are determined to depict leaders of industry as “upstarts from the very dregs of society” (“Mary Barton”). (See Figures 8 and 9.)

WALTER HARTRIGHT, THE primary narrator of The Woman in White (1859–60), commences the novel with a declaration – “This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve” – followed by a complaint that relative poverty drove that “story” out of the courts because “the machinery of the Law” relies so heavily on “the lubricating influences of oil of gold” (5). Despite this beginning, the novel's concern with legal procedure is playfully opportunistic. Here Hartright grumbles about the Law's avaricious practice, but Collins will make a lawyer, Mr Wansborough, the key agent in Hartright's enrichment and social elevation. By contrast the novel is deeply engaged with its own historical moment as a time when creative endeavors of all kinds were being transformed by the laws of machinery. And thus it is the vehicle for Collins's metaphorical legal system – the creaking and covetous machine – that points to my present argument: that The Woman in White is English literature's first industrialized kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist which seeks to reconcile representation and reproduction by equating modern modes of illustration with the primal goals of biological creation.

WITH WALTER CRANE, marginality is a question of medium. For his contemporaries, Crane's artistic practice embodied the ethos of Arts and Crafts eclecticism, apparent in this view of his studio from 1885 (Figure 15): watercolor, oil painting, tempera, sculpture, design, and illustration vie for our attention. As the painter Sir William Rothenstein recalled, “Crane could do anything he wanted, or anyone else wanted” (292). As an artist, designer, and – crucially – a socialist, Crane disregarded the traditional distinctions between high art and popular culture. With a history of art constructed along the fault lines of media, school, and style, Crane's diverse artistic practice and radical politics defy easy categorization. And this is precisely the point: his work requires the viewer to think across media, to move from the margins of wallpaper and illustration to the center of painting and back again. Or perhaps it is more fruitful to think of this process as one of inversion, placing wallpaper at the center and painting at its margins. According to Homi Bhabha, it is this “disjunctive temporality” (151) of the margins that allows cultural identity and political solidarities to emerge. The forging of political solidarities through art was the crux of Crane's project, and the disruption of established cultural hierarchies signaled the central role of art in political agitation. Visible on the right margin of photograph of Crane's studio (see Figure 15), the watercolor Pandora from 1885 (Figure 16) provides an ideal starting point for an exploration of the ways in which socialist politics move from the decorative margins to the very heart of Crane's art, a process enabled by the artist's politicized reinterpretation of classical mythology.