The figure of darwin hovered like a specter over the fin de siècle, not only the Darwin of the explosive 1859 On the Origin of Species that redirected evolutionary thinking but also the author of the 1871 Descent of Man — a less heralded work, though generating equally significant repercussions with its pronouncements on the intellectual capacities of the sexes. By linking a perceived mental inferiority of women to the mechanism of evolution, Darwin seemingly brought scientific proof to support a cultural truism. In so doing, he reinforced Victorian strictures that maintained women in a subservient state, which now could be justified on the basis of biological determinism. Yet Sarah Grand's popular 1897 novel, The Beth Book, contests the Darwinian verities, questioning the scientists' specious conclusions about sex-linked traits and identifying culture as an equally significant force determining the mental dispositions of the sexes.

Algernon Charles Swinburne's Specimens of Modern Poets: The Heptalogia or The Seven Against Sense, a volume of parodic poems published in 1880, is a text that has sparked little modern criticism, and even those few remarks seem to take the volume about as seriously as contemporary critics did, seeing it essentially as a mark of Swinburne's well-known talent for imitation. Andreas Höfele, the most recent critic to mention the work, is perhaps the first to consider the work as more than a literary lark, seeing in it a self-conscious reflection upon the procedures of literary imitation, and upon Swinburne's own artistry. Höfele's valuable but rather general comments lack detailed analysis, and any greater specificity in his article only goes so far as to say that the volume aims its wit at “poetry with a message,” and has particular sport with the more “earnest” of the poets, namely Tennyson and Patmore. Jerome McGann's Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism does mention The Heptalogia in the context of Swinburne's talent for pastiche and imitation — but he places the parody volume outside of Swinburne's primary intentions: “These things [The Heptalogia and his other literary ‘hoaxes and burlesques’] are much, it is true, but they also seem, as it were, the outlying territories of an ideal center within which he would live” (80). This dismissal, on top of lack of attention to The Heptalogia, needs to be remedied, and it is the intention of this essay to do so.

The second chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a metaphor that is worth considering: “The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when the man awoke” (17; ch. 2). The “crevices of the canvas” are, in my opinion, emblematic of the breach by which Henchard has just severed the bonds between himself and humankind. Not only has he shaken loose from his wife, he has also, more importantly, discarded his own daughter. As Elaine Showalter has pointed out, the sale of the child brings to the fore the question of paternity; Henchard has broken the symbolic chain which connected him to both his ancestors and his offspring, and he re-enters society alone, “the new Adam, reborn, self-created, unencumbered” (57). In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, as Jan Gordon observes, a similar rupture affects historical continuity (366). The pointed shaft of the mail-cart piercing the breast of the unhappy horse, Prince, and releasing a flood of blood that cannot be staunched, represents that breach metaphorically. In the two novels, Hardy deals with a breach in the succession of generations and the subsequent impossibility to re-unite what has been sundered. In both stories, a missing link in a chain of symbolic transmission sets off a tragic process that will end only with the death of the heroes.

Victorian ambivalence toward Romanticism is expressed with alternating vehemence and reticence. Repudiating “the noise / And outcry of the former men” who “left their pain” for Victorian generations (“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” 127–28, 131), in his critical essays Arnold nevertheless reiterates respect for Wordsworth, and in “Dover Beach” he incorporates the free-associationist structure of Coleridge' conversation poems. In Hard Times, the rural world beyond Coketown and Blackpool' gospel of the holiness of the heart constitute Dickens' consolations for the hellish industrial wasteland, but at the same time Harthouse — personifying the empty prodigality and flashy decadence that Victorians saw in Byron and Shelley — subverts moral order. Browning, though warning against the self-defeating diffidence and isolation of the Romantic artist in “Andrea del Sarto,” reaffirms Romantic individuality of vision and rebellion against tradition in “Fra Lippo Lippi.” While venerating the Goethe who proclaimed aspiration for infinitude and extension of the limits of possibility, Carlyle sees Lord Byron as the personification of moral and psychic pathology — unreined sorrow and cynicism, world weariness and decadent hedonism, derisive mockery and pessimism, high-strung sensitivity and emotional vulnerability — defects which Carlyle also sees as immanent in Shelley and which are subsumed in the Victorians' image of the negative side of the Romantics:

Poor Shelley always is a ghastly object: colorless, pallid, tuneless, without health or warmth or vigour, the sound of him shrieky, frosty, as if a ghost were trying to sing to us; the temperament of him, spasmodic, hysterical, instead of strong or robust — a man infinitely too weak for that solitary scaling of the Alps. (Reminiscences 2: 292–93; qtd. in Buckley 22)

It has not passed unnoticed that the courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett coincides with Barrett's ambivalent fascination for mesmerism. But what has not been explicated is the interrelationship between mesmeric agency, the courtship correspondence, and Barrett's autobiographical Sonnets from the Portuguese. Daniel Karlin has suggestively described Barrett's representation of her suitor as an erotic mesmerist, to Browning's discomfort, but Karlin assumes the familiar stereotype of mesmeric power as an unproblematic operation of a dominant male practitioner upon a passive female patient. This essay critiques such an assumption, and suggests that a revised model of mesmeric influence helps elucidate not only Barrett's representation of the courtship in the letters and the Sonnets, but literary influence as well. If Barrett depicts herself in the thrall of a mesmeric agency, then how do we read what is interpreted by feminist critics as her revolutionary active subject position in the Sonnets, which has been taken as the transformation of Victorian women's poetry?

Henry James's Autobiography recalls a first vision of “vast portentous London” in 1855, and contrasts brother William's boredom to his own imaginative response to the city (Small Boy 157, 170–71). Having moved there, he feels that amid the “London scene” he can fully exercise his “intellectual curiosity,” feeding “on the great supporting and enclosing scene itself” (Middle Years 553, 564). A later announcement to William Dean Howells that “henceforth I must do, or half do, England in fiction” comes as no surprise (Letters 284). James would follow up his intention in half-a-dozen novels, gradually refining the treatment of broad aesthetic, moral, and political issues in The Tragic Muse and The Princess Casamassima to a more specific “form of social-scientific inquiry” into characters and their interactions (Mizruchi 119). The novels written during the last years of Victoria's reign — The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, and The Sacred Fount — convey perceptions of crumbling social values, “the lost sense, the brutalized manner” (James, Notebooks 196), through close analysis of individuals' speech, actions, motives, and relationships. Indeed, James held that wider trends were summed up by the differences between the personal traits of Victoria and her heir. After the old queen's death, he voiced misgivings in various letters: whereas she had been “a kind of nursing mother of the land and of the empire,” Edward was “an arch-vulgarian,” whose accession seemed bound to bring “vulgarity and frivolity” (qtd. in Edel 2: 426). The tone is first gloomy, “It's a new era — and we don't know what it is,” and later resigned: “We live notoriously, as I suppose every age lives, in an ‘epoch of transition’ ” (Preface, Awkward Age 12). A strong conviction that personal and social behavior influence and signify each other informs such comments.

Victorian travel has always been about the politics of leaving home. And in a twentieth-century critical universe shaped by some of the fundamental questions about the making of “home” and “away” and the invention of “self” and “other,” the field of Victorian travel has necessarily taken its place at the center of a critical discourse about the sometimes fabulous and often sordid details of the colonial encounter. The Western travelers of such encounters are intriguing figures if simply because, despite the multiple voyagers' mythologies that adhere to them, they do not escape the demands of the Victorian world at home or the intricate structures of power out of which this world is made. Rather, the English adventurers who ostensibly left England behind for the mangrove swamps and cannibal villages of Africa regularly reproduced in their travels some of the very same structures of power from which they were purportedly freed. In leaving home, the English traveler also quite literally rediscovered it.

Art making and art viewing activities steeped in assumptions about gender recur throughout Jane Eyre and Villette. This paper will argue that Charlotte Bronte developed these fine arts devices as part of a carefully crafted feminist critique of spectatorship and representation. Bronte pursued this end by demonstrating that incidents relating to the production and reception of visual culture were relevant for visual experience more broadly understood by linking these events in the narrative to “scopic custom”; that is, the art experiences of Bronte's characters are presented as occurring in relation to the customary, gendered patterns of looking and being looked at which dominated Victorian society. This strategic interweaving of visual culture with scopic custom allows Bronte to accentuate their interdependence as a socio-cultural dynamic of critical significance, and to illuminate their share in the cultural and social constraints affecting women as producers and objects of representation.

A prominent pattern in the weave of Jane Eyre's station, attitudes, and narrative is her finances, skewed by lineage and wont. Jane's fortune and psyche are as warped when she becomes wealthy and a writer as when she was a young, anxious outcast whom poverty demeaned and challenged. Her memoirs critique religious hypocrisy, male chauvinism, and economic degradation, but also expose her pernicious outlook on matrimony and Mammon, in contrast to a proclaimed wedded bliss. “[T]he same catastrophe — marriage” (228; ch. 19) — that she wryly predicts for romances, real and fictional, is a stigma on her character. Jane Eyre records a twisted lesson about an heir straitened by serving too many masters. Jane, knowing she has mistaken wealth for a panacea, not a dangerous pharmakon, is no feminist paragon in a conventional rags-to-riches tale, but rather a disillusioned, haunted woman whose mendacity is a function and mainstay of her knotted, (under)privileged life. When she often wants “a facile word or plausible pretext… to get [herself] out of painful embarrassment” (277–78; ch. 23), candor shades into equivocation. Neither marriage nor writing makes an honest woman of her. Portraying herself as independent and principled, Jane at the end of her narrative rope seems to attain what her cousin, St. John Rivers, calls “the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilized affluence” (417; ch. 34). However, Jane often feigns placidity, and Ferndean is “deep buried in a wood … [an] ineligible and insalubrious site … no opening anywhere” — which makes her think she “had taken a wrong direction and lost [her] way” (455; ch. 37).

Although romance QUA romance is often seen as leading to the grim finality of the Victorian marriage plot, Charlotte Brontë's second novel, Shirley (1849), thwarts readerly expectations. Brontë cautions the reader that “if you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken,” but also teases that “it is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting” (39; ch. 1). This disavowal, coupled with contradicting hints of romance, appears in the second paragraph of Shirley and establishes the vexed dynamic surrounding the marriage plot present throughout the novel.

Like many other seventeen-year-olds, Miss Ginevra Fanshawe in Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) practices self-reflexive, generic word play as she characteristically “substituted this word ‘chose’ in temporary oblivion of the real name. It was a habit she had: ‘chose’ came in at every turn in her conversation — the convenient substitute for any missing word in any language she might chance at the time to be speaking” (115–16; ch. 6). Ginevra's word choice appears by no means accidental in this text riddled with (often bilingual) word-play substitutions, what Mary Pollack in a different context terms the novel's “rich matrix of conflicting insights about the nature of language” (54). In fact, chose seems a repeated code word for the enigmatic x, or thing itself, “the thing, the spirit, and the secret itself” (557; ch. 38), which Lucy sees in Paul and which lovers, metaphysicians, and literary theorists alike nostalgically, if not narcissistically, long to re-present. The word most often substituted for “thing” in the text is “shape,” like the “dark, usurping shape” (569; ch. 39) of the spectral nun, the problem being, however, that every such double or “daemonic shape” (Freud 143) uncannily either erases itself or serially forks into other metonymic representations which problematize any homesick quest for origins. Even the “shapes” of the “paving-stones,” which Lucy pointedly re-members a year later at the “very threshold” (305; ch. 21) of the entrance of Madame Beck's Pensionnat, only provide a kind of liminal entrancement, another abyssal signifier uncannily signifying uncertain values.

The idea of a literary canon is inextricably connected in English-speaking countries with the Arnolds: Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, who was credited with revivifying the classical curriculum while recreating the great public schools, and his eldest son, Matthew, the most influential nineteenth-century spokesman for the moral, spiritual, social, and cultural efficacy of a canon widened to include English poetry and available, at least in theory, to every literate English person. Like his father, Matthew Arnold was a professional educator: he earned his living as an inspector of schools, mostly elementary schools for the poor. For both Arnolds, the canon is the curriculum at the heart of the pedagogical enterprise; and the grand, almost mystical power they attached to it spilled over onto the pedagogue. Their professional careers entailed considerable sacrifice of worldly ambition, but the power of pedagogy as they conceived it became their object and their reward.

By February of 1858, the American abolitionist community had at least twice been exposed to a poem — attributed to Robert Browning — entitled “The King is Cold.” It appeared in January in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly newspaper published in New York City, and, one month later, it was reprinted in William Garrison's Boston paper, the Liberator. Yet aside from this brief record of publication, the poem has left no discernible traces, either before or since. The oddly one-sided (i.e., American) appearances of “The King is Cold” surely contributed to its being overlooked by generations of Browning scholars and editors, including such modern fugitive-hunters as Broughton, Honan, and Kelley. In fact, with a few notable exceptions, Browning scholarship has been reluctant to extend its efforts across the Atlantic. We still await an analysis of the poet's American transactions that would update the important research done by Louise Greer in the 1950s. For most of his life, Browning was much more popular in the United States than in England, and, as Greer puts it, “Browning must have known more Americans than any other English man of letters” (39). And, although their author never visited the United States, Browning's poems arrived by the 1840s, finding enthusiastic audiences that included such luminaries as Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson, and Thomas Higginson. This Boston intellectual clique — transcendentalist, Unitarian, and abolitionist — recognized in Robert (and, more rapidly, in Elizabeth Barrett) the “brave translunary things that our first poets had” (Lowell qtd. in Greer 14). As the uncatalogued existence of “The King is Cold” suggests, the fruits of this special relationship remain incompletely gathered.

In a recent review essay in this journal (25.2), Timothy Morton considered a number of works of literary criticism on the centrality of commodification in Victorian literature and culture. This essay will look at the intersection of work in which economists and literary critics have interrogated Victorian economics and their afterlife: models of production and reproduction (classical political economy and Malthusian population theory), consumption (the calculation of pleasure, happiness, and taste), labor (as a theory of value), value (in relation to price), “Economic Man” (as productive pursuer of gain or, after the 1870s, rational chooser among scarcity), and so forth. This work, which has brought into dialogue economists, literary and cultural critics, and historians and philosophers of science, has flourished in the past decade, and this essay will focus on aspects of it relevant to the study of Victorian Britain.

Literature and science: no longer two cultures? Back in the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn headed us toward this conclusion when he emphasized how deeply science was embedded in culture in The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962). Since then, both cultural and literary analysts have theorized about just how literary texts actualize cultural assumptions, including those of science (Michael Riffaterre, “Flaubert's Presuppositions,” Diacritics 11: 2–11). Science offers but one of a number of competing discourses within a culture (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989); authors — of all sorts — are free to reconstruct any of them, and both science and literature realize culture. I draw the verb, “realize,” from Gillian Beer, whose book Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter offers the occasion for this review. Beer's book reprints fourteen masterful essays that delineate ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific ideas have been realized. Beer chooses her verb carefully. Scientists, she suggests, are no different from other purveyors of ideas; they never know whom their work will influence or whose ends it will serve. Helmholtz can, for example, turn up in a poem by Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. We are always to understand that the cultural encounter between science and society moves in both directions and that any culture can provide striking correspondences. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, scientific hunts for missing links evolved concurrently with the sleuthing of literary detectives.

One of the most influential of recent efforts to take Hardy's strange poetic reputation in hand has been that of Donald Davie, himself a poet, who in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry saluted Hardy's “scientific humanism” and noted his poetic “engineering” as that of a poetically “self-made man.” Thus Davie re-made Hardy, creating a combination of a poetic Samuel Smiles and a poetic Isambard Kingdom Brunei conducting himself with technical assurance and brio — but with limited and “mechanical” poetic aims (13, 40). Perhaps it's the “visibly ideological” nature of Davie's performance here which makes it still so arresting, and “smaller and clearer as the years go by.” In a once-famous essay, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” T. S. Eliot complained (or at least explained) that the many writers about him re-made Shakespeare in their own images. Coleridge's “smack of Hamlet,” which read off a Hamlet invested with his own qualities as he construed them, perhaps also indicates how common this sort of thing may be.