IT IS THE EARLY AFTERNOON of October 7, 1857. Charles Hadden Spurgeon ascends to the pulpit and announces, “there are such things as national judgments, national chastisements for national sins” (1). The topic is the electrifying and as yet unresolved “Mutiny” in India.I place “Mutiny” in quotation marks in my title and throughout my text. My intention is to recall that such a naming of the 1857 rebellion is already an interpretation, and one that has been cogently questioned, notably by the historians Chaudhuri and Stokes, both of whom find their place within my argument. However, I retain this naming in my text as it is, throughout the Victorian era and in the early twentieth century, the most common and recognizable way of referring to the 1857 uprisings in India. The speaker is arguably the most popular preacher of the mid-Victorian period. I do not, however, attach a special importance to Spurgeon's words simply on the basis of his engaging topic and his personal celebrity. Spurgeon is speaking in the Crystal Palace, that signal monument to mid-Victorian England's preeminence among nations; he has before him an assembled crowd of 24,000 listeners. Spurgeon, moreover, is not alone in sermonizing on rebellion in India on this particular day. More or less simultaneously reverend preachers all over the British Isles are weaving their way through the “Mutiny” topic. Queen Victoria, as one learns from the dailies of September 28 (I take my text from the Morning Post), has declared October 7 a national “fast-day”: “We, taking into our most serious consideration the grievous mutiny…in India, command…a Public Day of Fast, Humiliation, and Prayer…so both we and our people may humble ourselves before Almighty God, in order to obtain pardon for our sins” (Victoria 4).

NINETEENTH-CENTURY WESTERN OBSERVERS of the South Seas often worried that the islanders were losing touch with their past and were forgetting the traditions of their ancestors. In writing about their concerns these commentators frequently identified the missionaries as being responsible for this loss. To a certain degree, their perspective was correct, for one does not have to search far to find examples of the missionaries' culpability. If one looks more closely, however, one learns that the missionaries (especially those representing the London Missionary Society) also preserved part of what they had destroyed by studying and gathering artifacts from the island cultures they had invaded. As time passed, these missionary collections became important to anthropologists, for they were visual reminders of an older, almost extinct Polynesian culture. They became a means through which to recall the past.

PRIOR TO THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, Europeans had heard of Buddhism, if at all, as an aside in tales of the exotic Orient in which the Buddha figured as a minor Hindu deity or a celestial sun god. Eastern thought had trickled back toward the seats of Western empires for centuries along the same routes used for tea and opium, but serious engagement with that thought only began in the late eighteenth century with translations of the Bhagavadgita, and systematic study of Eastern sacred texts did not begin in France, Germany, and England until around the 1820s.I draw here and throughout on a number of historical studies, in particular Almond, Batchelor, Lopez, and Welbon. As Almond notes, it was only in the first half of the century “that the term ‘Buddha’ (‘Buddoo’, ‘Bouddha’, ‘Boudhou’, etc.) began to gain currency… and that the term ‘Buddhism’ first made its appearance in English in the scholarly journals which appeared, in part at least, as a consequence of the developing imperial interest of both England and France in the Orient“ (7). The first English study of Buddhism that I have found is Upham (1829). As late as the 1860s, but rapidly at that point, Buddhism “hit” Europe, becoming a wide-spread topic that peaked in London's “Buddhism-steeped Nineties” and then declined after the turn of the century (Caracciolo 30).This claim is supported by the fact that a search of the PCI (Periodicals Content Index) database for articles published with “Buddha” or “Buddhism” in the title reveals this pattern: 3 in the period 1840–50; 0 in 1851–60; 13 in 1861–70; 74 in 1871–80; 148 in 1881–90; 367 in 1891–1900; 287 in 1901–10; and 243 in 1911–20. One indicator of burgeoning British interest was the publication in the last three decades of the century of at least three book-length poems recounting the life of Buddha. In particular, Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. Being The Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Büddhism (1879) became a best-seller in Europe, India, and America and was credited with inspiring conversions to Buddhism, as well as with influencing Rudyard Kipling's creation of the character of the Teshoo Lama in Kim (1901).The other two poems I refer to are Philips's The Story of Gautama Buddha and his Creed: An Epic (1871) and Alexander's Sakya-Muni: The Story of Buddha (1887), which was the Newdigate Prize poem at Oxford in 1887. The most famous conversion attributed to reading The Light of Asia was of Charles Bennett, who in 1901 became Ananda Metteyya, the first British Buddhist monk. As Humphreys puts it in The Development of Buddhism in England, Bennett, “like many before him and untold thousands since, found that a new world of spiritual adventure was opened before his eyes” by The Light of Asia (13). On Arnold's influence on Kipling, see Whitlark “Nineteenth-Century ‘Nirvana Talk’.” The initial premise of this essay is that through the latter decades of the century themes and figures drawn in part or whole from Buddhism increasingly made their way into British literary discourse. This appears to be especially true of “sensational” and “romance” novels, a fact significant in itself for understanding how Buddhism filtered into British culture (though full consideration of the relationship between those sub-genres and Eastern thought will have to await another occasion). But to the extent that one can detect such concepts as reincarnation, karma, and nirvana, for instance, in works of literature of the time, they generally are hybridized with Christian, Gnostic, Rosicrucian, alchemical, Greek pantheistic, ancient Egyptian, and other occult figures. This hybridization is another significant aspect of the ways in which Victorians struggled to construct a Buddhism in their own image. Buddhism pervaded late nineteenth-century European thought, though diffusely. It was woven into the complex fabric of discourses concerning empire, the crisis in Christianity (recently exacerbated by Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Nietzsche, among others), and the general perception that spirituality had come under increasing threat in a society dominated by the materialism of the market and the rationality of science.On the influence of Buddhism on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see Welbon and Schwab, as well as analysis in Dumoulin.

N 1891 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL, father of the more famous Winston, visited South Africa and the soon-to-be Rhodesia on a trip that was intended to combine big-game hunting with the even more exciting prospects of entering the gold mining business. During the eight months of the visit, Churchill contributed a series of letters to the Daily Graphic on his thoughts and experiences, in one of which he had this to say about the Boers: The Boer farmer personifies useless idleness. Occupying a farm of from six thousand to ten thousand acres, he contents himself with raising a herd of a few hundred head of cattle, which are left almost entirely to the care of the natives whom he employs. It may be asserted, generally with truth, that he never plants a tree, never digs a well, never makes a road, never grows a blade of corn…. He passes his day doing absolutely nothing beyond smoking and drinking coffee. He is perfectly uneducated. With the exception of the Bible, every word of which in its most literal interpretation he believes with fanatical credulity, he never opens a book, he never even reads a newspaper. His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unprogressive as himself. In the winter time he moves with his herd of cattle into the better pastures and milder climate of the low country veldt, and lives as idly and uselessly in his waggon as he does in his farmhouse. The summer sees him returning home, and so on [sic], year after year, generation after generation, the Boer farmer drags out the most ignoble existence ever experienced by a race with any pretensions to civilization. (94–95) The piece caused an outcry, and when a year later Churchill republished the letters as Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa (1892), he attempted to exonerate himself by claiming that these views were intended “to be exclusively confined to…the Dutch population of the Transvaal,” not “generally to the Dutch in South Africa” and went on: “The Dutch settlers in Cape Colony are as worthy of praise as their relatives, the Transvaal Boers, are of blame. The former, loyal, thrifty, industrious, hospitable, liberal are and will, I trust, remain the back-bone of our great colony at the Cape of Good Hope” (v–vi).

BY THE TIME “THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE” appeared in the Strand magazine in 1913, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's readers were already familiar with the dynamics of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his “friend and colleague” Dr. Watson. They would thus not have been surprised to see Holmes, lying apparently delirious and deathly ill, pointing out with his last breath the intellectual limitations of the friend who has come to cure him: “Shall I demonstrate to you your own ignorance? What do you know, pray, of Tapanuli fever? What do you know of the black Formosa corruption?”“I have never heard of either.”“There are many problems of disease, many strange pathological possibilities, in the East, Watson.” He paused after each sentence to collect his failing strength. “I have learned so much during some recent researches which have a medico-criminal aspect. It was in the course of them that I contracted this complaint. You can do nothing.” (DYIN 2: 388)I cite from the two-volume Bantam Classic edition, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories. Like other Holmes scholars, I have also followed the convention of using the standard four-letter abbreviations set out by Jack Tracy's The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana. But this dissertation on the good doctor's “ignorance” is more than a commentary on Watson's personal shortcomings; it is the voice of the specialist declaring that the “general practitioner” is not competent to treat this kind of complaint. Disease has slipped out of the realm of medicine and into the province of the “medico-criminal” expert. Britain's expansion into “the East” has introduced it to “pathological possibilities” that cannot be shut down through the operations of ordinary medical science and which must instead be contained by Holmes's own special “powers” (388).

OF THE GOD that appears in so many of Thomas Hardy's lyrics as so many shapes of one name, of the God that appears to defy common description because each of his many shapes is unique, this may be said: He easily entertains the supposition of his own disappearance. That this peculiar claim so closely echoes one made by Emerson about the disappearance of literature is intentional; in rendering the prospect of divine dissolution, Hardy reveals profound misgivings about the efficacy of poetry as a symbolic means for coming to terms with the painful and toilsome experience of living, and about the continued adequacy of poetic efforts to provide “a frame of acceptance” for suffering humanity (Burke, Attitudes 5)The original reads “Criticism must be transcendental, that is, must consider literature ephemeral & easily entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance” (qtd. in Poirier, Renewal 27).. That this claim probably elicits less surprise and uneasiness than ironic acknowledgement in readers already familiar with Hardy's lyrics, that it rings vaguely true even before they turn back to the poems themselves may indicate how inured these same readers have grown to even the most extravagant instances of Hardy's “unrelieved pessimism.”The phrase “unrelieved pessimism” appears in “The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy” (Blackmur 2). It may derive from Lytton Strachey's 1914 review of Hardy's Satires and Circumstances, Lyrics and Reveries: “The desolation is complete. And the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction” (225).

SPIRITUALISM WAS SEXY. The Victorian faith of sittings, mediums, and spirit contact thrilled its practitioners and detractors alike and broke all rules of decency and decorum in spite of the fact that it was nurtured and developed in the drawing rooms of the proprietous middle classes. A faith little known to modern scholars and, perhaps for that reason, one which has not often been recognized for its historical and social importance, Spiritualism became the religion of thousands over the course of the last four decades of the period. In spite of its humble and strange beginnings in 1848–a code of raps developed between a murdered peddler and two young American girls–aristocrats, scholars, and scientists, along with ordinary men and women of all ages, were converted to the belief that death was no barrier to communication. This contact, achieved through the services of mediums, who were sensitive to the sounds and sights of the spirit world, provided many with comfort, peace, and the reassurance of an afterlife in a social and intellectual climate that called those things into doubt.

“MUSEUMS,” VERNON LEE WRITES in her 1881 Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, are “evil necessities where art is arranged and ticketed and made dingy and lifeless even as are plants in a botanic collection” (18). Lee's career as a writer and aesthetician coincided almost exactly with what Paul Greenhalgh has called the “golden age” of the exhibition – 1871 to 1914 (26) – and she devoted much of it to making sense of the strange interactions with art offered by museum-going. She was not alone in this effort; during the period I will examine, from the 1880s to 1914, countless stories and articles in the popular press depicted museum settings. These accounts, I will argue, were part of a larger cultural effort to make sense of museums in terms the middle classes could understand, and to clarify what there was about museum-displayed objects that made them worth looking at. Ultimately, I will suggest, these accounts charge museum-displayed objects with a specifically museal aura: a transcendent essence linked to their presentation as decommodified, decontextualized objects under the care of an expert and under the gaze of a properly detached and analytical museum-goer.

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT, WITH the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë established a landmark in the history of the novel, but there is little agreement as to exactly what she accomplished or how she pulled it off. Brontë's detractors, as well as her defenders, have often stopped short of treating her as a mature artist or social theorist, explaining her power as “personal” or “autobiographical.” They adjourn further analysis of such qualities by expressing their distaste for, or at best, faintly embarrassed appreciation of, her intensely personal, perilously autobiographical, violently passionate style. There is a family resemblance between Matthew Arnold's disgust at Brontë's “hunger, rebellion and rage” (Letters 132), Virginia Woolf's wariness of her “self-centered and self-limited” but “overpowering personality” (Common Reader 222–23), and Terry Eagleton's ambivalent acknowledgment that Brontë's novels, though politically compromising, nonetheless contain a radical “sexual demand – an angry, wounded, implacable desire for full personal acceptance and recognition” (xix). Each of these critics, to varying degrees, distrusts the personal and emotional as factors that pull Brontë (and her readers) too close to herself and too far away from either her social conscience or her art. Of course, in The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar valorize rather than regret Brontëan rage, but they still emphasize the violent emotion, on the verge of spinning out of control, pervading her “confessional art” (440).Gilbert and Gubar consider Brontë's oeuvre, especially Villette, “a literature of consciousness,” claiming that Brontë is “in some ways, a phenomenologist – attacking the discrepancy between reason and imagination, insisting on the subjectivity of the objective work of art, choosing as the subject of her fiction the victims of objectification, inviting her readers to experience with her the interiority of the Other” (440).

“[S]INCE CHRIST ASCENDED into Heaven, our electric communication with the Creator has been established, and an ever-flowing current of divine inspiration is turned beneficially in the direction of our Earth….” So writes Heliobas, the sage scientist from the East in Marie Corelli's first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (247; ch. 14). According to this character's religio-technological treatise on the Creation, God is a “Shape of pure Electric Radiance” and each human soul an electric spark emitted from this wellspring in the heavens (237; ch. 14). Many years after Genesis, human corruption and apathy prompted God to restore electric lines of communication with His wayward humans. For this purpose Christ was sent down to Earth, to establish a connection not unlike that made possible by submarine telegraphy; as Heliobas explains, “this Earth and God's World were like America and Europe before the Atlantic Cable was laid. Now the messages of goodwill flash under the waves, heedless of storms. So also God's Cable is laid between us and His Heaven in the person of Christ” (241; ch. 14). Romance's abundant technological metaphors for Christian worship–prayers imagined as telephone calls and the like (223; ch. 13)–culminate in this daring “Electric Principle of Christianity,” which reinterprets Christ as, in effect, a Word dispatched telegraphically (235; ch. 13).

IN 1864 FRANCES POWER COBBE jumped into the still-churning waters of Essays and Reviews (1860) and Colenso's Pentateuch (1862) with a book that put the case against an infallible Revelation even more frankly than these men had liked or dared. Broken Lights, her main contribution to the mid-Victorian Bible wars, went through at least eight editions and, next to her Duties of Women (1881), was the “most successful” of her books (Life 2: 370). Identifying “Frances Power Cobbe” on the title page as the “Author of an ‘Essay on Intuitive Morals,’ ‘The Pursuits of Women,’ etc.,“ the material object in a stranger's hands left no doubt that here was a work by a woman who had written on likely female subjects. Yet the table of contents, which lays out a schema of Churchmen's positions on the Bible questions of the hour, yields no clue that a feminist advocate wrote this book. Even in perusing its discussions of high theological matters, most readers would not have suspected, as I will argue, that the analyses of these men's positions are colored by Cobbe's distinctive “woman's perspective” (Caine 147), and that public and personal gender issues are being negotiated through its modes of discourse and argument.

HARDLY A CHAPTER goes by in novels like Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860) or Our Mutual Friend (1864) or Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) or The Way We Live Now (1875) without money being invoked. Generations of critics have noted that almost every relationship between characters comes with a pound sign attached. Thus The Last Chronicle of Barset belies its most esteemed and truthful character, Mr. Harding, when he says, “Money is worth thinking of, but it is not worth very much thought” (447; ch. 49). He is correct to the extent that money alone fails to do justice to the complexity of most of the relationships in the novel. In the first place, money is only a component of a broader and more pervasive set of connections that can be described as exchanges of capital. Indeed, as this essay shows in the case of The Last Chronicle of Barset, if one stands back from more than a few novels of the mid-Victorian decades, one can see that the intersections and progressions of fictional lives that they portray are couched within a larger pattern of interaction and exchange of which capital is the protagonist.Such a reading is implicit, if not explicit, in recent studies that analyze representations of circulation, whether of money, gossip, blood, or language itself. I am thinking particularly of Beer, Shell, Smart, and Trotter. If this formulation seems extreme, it is only one step beyond the arguments of recent studies that money is “perhaps the most common theme in nineteenth-century fiction” (Vernon 14) or that “the universal, leveling power of money is a theme intrinsic to, perhaps even definitive of, the novel form itself” (Brantlinger 23). The intensity of the nineteenth-century novelistic fascination with money in particular and capital in general can be explained in part by demonstrating, as Mary Poovey and James Thompson respectively have, that novelistic discourses emerged in eighteenth-century Britain in conjunction with the emergence of the discourses of political economy. Similarly, the fact that the mid-Victorian decades in particular produced such a large number of works organized around exchanges of capital is understandable in relationship to historical developments within capitalism. I have in mind especially the finalization in the 1830s of the long transition from gold to paper – from wealth as treasure to the exchange of capital – and the complete formalization in the first half of the nineteenth century of the central institutions of finance capitalism, namely the joint-stock company and the stock market.I mark this finalization with the standardizing of currency on the Bank of England note in 1833; only in 1844 were other British banks banned from issuing their own notes (Vernon 32). The London Stock Exchange was established in its modern institutional form in 1802 (Baskin 207). Also indicative of the period is that “[t]here were eight million pounds more paper money in circulation in 1825 than in 1823, with no corresponding increase in trade and industry to justify it”; at the same time, “there had developed a vast extension of private credit – the ‘new currency of the age’ – and the market was flooded with bills of exchange, promissory notes, and similar paper” (Russell 45). I of course am not claiming that paper money or stock trading did not exist prior to the nineteenth century. Rather, I am claiming that finance capitalism reached society-wide dissemination in the first half of the nineteenth century and only then took on the institutional forms that still are in place in the twenty-first century. As Ermarth remarks in this regard: “Market-places may be old; but the market-system, which ‘is a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining an entire society’ is a fairly recent invention, as new as the humanist conception of the species ‘man’, as new as ‘the profit motive’, and as new as the idea of gain conceived in terms of capital” (121). These contextual factors set the stage on which mid-Victorian novels in particular struggled to interpret and re-express the meaning of human relationship for a society increasingly organized by and obsessed with exchanges of capital. The first goal of this essay is to describe, more thoroughly and precisely than has been done to date, exactly how capital circulates through mid-Victorian novels, taking The Last Chronicle of Barset as a representative case. The second goal is to demonstrate how exchanges of capital are not only thematically significant but actually constitute the plot structure of this novel. Finally, the third purpose is to challenge certain recent critical arguments that continue to posit – even while critiquing – a separation in the nineteenth century of the domains of the novel and of political economy, a separation that reproduces the Victorian notion of “separate spheres” and underestimates the cultural work of mid-Victorian novels.

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN the image and nature of Christ was a prime site of ideological conflict. As the central figure in the dominant religious tradition, Christ was, perhaps inevitably, redefined and claimed by different social groups attempting to harness his remaining cultural influence. One of the dominant images of Christ, however, one that permeated Victorian Christianity, was distinctly feminized, emphasizing virtues and roles allotted to women according to “separate-spheres” gender ideology and often focusing on his passivity and suffering.

CHARLES DICKENS'S INTERESTS in legal and administrative reform are as apparent to readers as the famous depictions of Chancery and the Circumlocution Office in, respectively, Bleak House (1852–53) and Little Dorrit (1855–57). Dickens's equally profound engagement with sanitary reform is less obvious. In this essay I argue that the modern social consciousness engendered by the public health movement – including Edwin Chadwick's groundbreaking Sanitary Idea – is important to understanding Bleak House as well as underlying and more general questions of “pastoral” agency in a self-consciously liberal society.The notion of “pastorship” as the means by which a society governs its citizens, both inside and out of formal state mechanisms, is developed in Foucault's late thinking on “governmentality,” especially in “Subject,” “Governmentality,” and “Space.” Although Foucault never completed a revised model as such, these essays clearly aim to provide alternatives to the panoptical paradigm of Discipline and Punish. In my forthcoming book, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, I argue that governmentality describes Victorian Britain's self-consciously liberal society better than does the more influential panoptical model. Nevertheless, the present discussion does not profess to offer an orthodox Foucauldian reading of any kind. Explaining these convergences takes us to the very heart of the novel's frustrated desire for order, authority, and individual purpose while, at the same time, providing a useful vantage on contemporaneous social reforms. Dickens's 1851 preface to Oliver Twist elucidates the extent to which the author had been influenced by the sanitary movement's comprehensive environmentalist logic. Sanitary reform, he insists, must “precede all other Social Reforms,” preparing for “Education” and “even for Religion” (qtd. in Butt and Tillotson 190–91). Here sanitary reform is an unquestionable priority, crucial to the moral and physical wellbeing of the nation's social body. Seemingly impervious to entrenched divides between laissez faire and interventionist politics, Dickens appears to make a strong statement on behalf of state pastorship. But it would be a mistake to infer from such remarks that Dickens had become a staunch proponent of the state's duty not only (negatively) to prevent wrong, but also (positively) to intervene in the lives of individuals and communities.

GEORGE ELIOT FELT A WELL-KNOWN ambivalence toward “feminine” writing. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) mocks the “composite order of feminine fatuity” that characterizes her contemporaries' fiction (Writings 296). “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé” (1854) maintains that “[w]ith a few remarkable exceptions, our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men” (Writings 37). And “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) claims that feminine influence weakens the visual arts: “even those among our painters … who are far above the effeminate feebleness of ‘Keepsake’ style, treat their subjects under the direct influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation” (Writings 261). Given such evidence, it is not surprising that Isobel Armstrong hesitates to include Eliot in an important essay on the mid-Victorian poetess tradition, cautioning that “George Eliot … did not willingly associate herself with the ‘feminine’ tradition” (“Music” 370).

ON THE FAR SIDE OF MATTHEW ARNOLD'S familiar call for objectivism lies a world of phantoms. His phrase, “to see the object as in itself it really is,” responds to a vision of the social body as particularly in need of objectivity. And because it lacks this quality, Arnold's Victorian society is one that sees the object as in itself it really is not. This mode of perception is the other side of Arnold's writing: a world of prevailing hallucinations, where fictions are taken for fact and facts for fiction. Seeing the object as it is not takes a characteristic form in Arnold's writing. Illustrative is the stanza in “Empedocles on Etna,” when the philosopher describes what happens when a child is injured, and then compares it to the normal condition of social life: Scratch'd by a fall, with moansAs children of weak ageLend life to the dumb stonesWhereon to vent their rage,And bend their little fists, and rate the senseless ground. (1.2.272–76) Attributing “life” to a stone, or to the ground, is a particular way of seeing the object as it is not. It involves an imaginative attribution of power to the object, and this active investing then goes unrecognized by the child, who believes that the object's power exists independently, in the external world. The passage continues by resolving the simile of the injured child into a prototypical act of magically explaining the unknown: So, loath to suffer mute,We, peopling the void air,Make Gods to whom to imputeThe ills we ought to bear;With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily. (1.2.277–81) Both the reference and figure describe the process of fetishism, in its earliest form. Initially associated with “primitive” cultures, fetishism described a society in which supernatural powers are routinely attributed to inanimate objects. Empedocles is describing his own society as fetishistic, one that not only sees the object as it is not, but worships the object that is not, making a deity out of the void.

FINALLY PASSED IN 1847, the Ten Hours Bill restricted the number of hours worked by women and children in the factories to ten per day. Its enactment was the result of a lengthy political crusade whose chief parliamentary spokesman had been the Tory M.P., Lord Ashley. A decade later, in his two-volume History of the Factory Movement, Samuel Kydd (or “Alfred”) made a cursory, half-sentence reference to the “useful” contribution made to the campaign by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood (295).Tonna's dates are 1790–1846. Appearing as a novel in 1841, Helen Fleetwood was first serialised between September 1839 and March 1841 in the Christian Lady's Magazine (edited by Tonna 1834 to 1846). Written to persuade her female readership of the urgent need for a Ten Hours Bill, the novel depicts the devastating spiritual and physical consequences of factory work on the eponymous heroine and her adopted family. While Kydd acknowledges Tonna's contribution, the brevity of his remark suggests that her status in the Ten Hours Movement was, at most, ancillary. Kydd seems unaware of the articles about the Ten Hours Bill that Tonna wrote in her magazine. Nor does he refer to her work of 1843, “The Forsaken Home,” which portrays the calamitous domestic consequences of the long hours worked by factory women.This is all the more surprising when one considers Kydd's friendship with the Movement's extra-parliamentary leader, Richard Oastler (Driver 518). “The Forsaken Home” is the second of four stories by Tonna, each published as a separate book under the collective title The Wrongs of Woman (1843–44). The stories were published in the following order: “Milliners and Dress-Makers” (1843); “The Forsaken Home” (1843); “The Little Pin-Headers” (1843); “The Lace-Runners” (1844). Although Tonna continues to be critically obscure, recent literary historians have registered the full range of her writing on the Ten Hours Movement.It is important to acknowledge the work of literary historians such as Fryckstedt, Kestner, Kovacevic, Kanner and (in particular) Neff, which first began the process of raising Tonna's critical profile. Nonetheless, they have perpetuated Kydd's perception of her minor role by persistently characterizing her as meekly following where Ashley led. Wanda Fraiken Neff, for example, depicts Tonna as his “faithful” supporter, someone who “reflected his views” (35, 68). Similarly, Joseph Kestner describes her as having merely “accepted Ashley's fervid word” (93).

ON OCTOBER 23, 1873, an enthusiastic reporter for the Times observed: “In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now, and tolerable well too …. Eloquence is but a facility, or instrument, or weapon, or accomplishment, or, in academic terms, an art …. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people” (7). What an understanding of this nation of public speakers might mean for the study of socio-political and literary culture in the nineteenth century has only recently begun to be explored. In last year's issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose, the historian Martin Hewitt observed: “The platform culture of nineteenth-century Britain was so ubiquitous that its omnipresence has helped to render it strangely invisible. We look through it in search of material on all aspects of the period, but we fail to look at it, to interrogate it as a cultural form in its own right” (1). Seeing voices can be a tricky business, but – given the pervasive nature of this platform culture – Hewitt's call for a shift of emphasis from “material” to “form” is timely. What I want to offer here is a survey of this emerging field of study via an account of recent work by social and political historians. My account of what has been done will then lead to a suggestion of what might be left to do, and more particularly, to a consideration of the uses of this body of historical research for the study of literature in the period.

RECENT ATTEMPTS at a critical recuperation of the fiction of Charlotte M. Yonge have largely sidestepped the issue of her work's commitment to a religious perspective. June Sturrock's brief 1995 monograph, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge's Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women, is focused on the way in which Yonge's Tractarian beliefs provided a framework within which a conservative feminist account of an independent social role for women could be articulated, but takes those beliefs themselves as givens. Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström's more substantial 1984 study, Be Good Sweet Maid: Charlotte Yonge's Domestic Fiction: A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form, whilst noting a relationship between apparent changes in Yonge's religious beliefs and differences in the form of her novels, is characterized by a formalist mode of interpretation which tends to bracket off the question of how Yonge presents religious belief in her novels from any wider context in Victorian religious thought.

THE CRITICAL AND SCHOLARLY attention to Charles Dickens and his body of work in the last few years is quite varied, ranging from detailed critical analysis of singular aspects of his work to broader studies of his role as commentator and critic in Victorian England. Dickens scholarship, which once might have led to articles in PMLA, has morphed into historical-critical studies using deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the new historicism, and other disciplines. One omission, surprisingly, in this latest batch is the passing over of Dickens's flaws as a novelist and thinker – so that in turning him into an iconic figure critics have often glossed over his shakiness of structure, his contradictory ideas, and his failure to achieve a consistent fictional ideology. I emphasize a “fictional” ideology, since we have no reason to demand that a novelist sustain any consistent social or political agenda. A fictional one becomes necessary in order for the novelist to uphold his or her own voice, personal tone, that meeting of the reader's expectations with the writer's sense of order (or disorder).