Coda

This concluding chapter reverses the perspective of the preceding chapters and explores travel writings of Meiji Japanese women who sailed to Victorian Britain. It focuses on the writings of three Japanese women—namely, Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko—with diverse backgrounds and purposes. It picks up testimonies of travelling women in Meiji Japan who encountered British people and culture and unveils cross-racial female intimacy and burgeoning transnational feminist alliance on the issues of women’s education and civil rights. It documents their connections with Victorian female educationists such as Dorothea Beale and Elizabeth Phillips Hughes and discovers a long-forgotten link between Isabella Bird and Meiji women’s education.

A Scientist in Love

Chapter 4 investigates Marie Stopes’s interracial, cross-gender relationships with Fujii Kenjirō and Sakurai Jōji through her three published Japanese-related works—A Journal from Japan (1910), Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911), and Plays of Old Japan: The ‘Nō’ (1913)—along with her unpublished transcripts and correspondence. It unveils an unconventional, stormy romance, a warm friendship, and literary collaboration. It considers the gender and racial complexities Stopes textually negotiated for the sake of her love and friendship against the rigid imperial ideology and the Victorian notion of femininity, which produced a distinct representation of humanized Japan as Britain’s masculine ally with feminine sensibility. It also discusses particular challenges Western women in a cross-racial relationship faced in Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan. The close examination of this underexplored phase of Stopes’s career reveals the incipience of her sexology and complicates the posthumous, more controversial aspect of her as eugenicist.

Stage Piracy in Victorian Britain: Bleak House Adaptations

Pirating novels for the stage was a staple of the Victorian theatre. There were many theatrical piracies of Bleak House in the second half of the period, but they all share a common feature: pirates had to decide how to reshape the narrative for audience consumption since the whole of this sprawling novel was impossible to stage. Thus fidelity to the original text was out of the question. This essay examines two Bleak House adaptations, an early and largely forgotten version and a later version that gained a global reputation. It considers the range of challenges pirates faced when adapting Bleak House as well as how the narrative is adapted to audience expectations across time and genre in the late Victorian period so that, out of the novel’s multivocality, Jo emerges as the centre of the story.

Neo-Victorian felony – Crime narratives in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project and Ian McGuire’s The North Water

The neo-Victorian novel has been one of the most significant branches of contemporary British historical fiction for the past three decades. Thanks to works like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Sarah Waters’ trilogy Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the genre has gained not only considerable popularity among readers, but also almost a canonical literary status. Although recent neo-Victorian fiction has been trying to find some new ways in which the genre could avoid stereotypical narratives, it still retains its most determining idiosyncrasies. One of them is an interest in the undersides of Victorian society, including the themes of violence and criminality, which is why these novels often resort to the genre of crime and detective fiction. This is also the case of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016), both historical novels set in Victorian Britain which were, respectively, shortlisted and longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This paper attempts to show the different manners in which these two novels employ various forms of crime narratives so as to achieve their goal of presenting convincing and seemingly authentic insights into the more obscure aspects of the Victorian era.

“Things I Can Remember about My Life”: Autobiography and Fatherhood in Victorian Britain

It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984–1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical research into areas such as the emotions and domestic life that had hardly been imagined at the time that the annotated bibliography was produced. Yet as research into working-class autobiography has extended into new domains of enquiry, there has been less innovation in methodology. Historians typically use autobiographical material to pursue deep-reading strategies and unpack the meaning, experience, and identity of individual writers rather than generalize about working-class life more broadly. In this article I offer an alternative strategy: to take the autobiographical corpus and read it at scale in order to better understand fatherhood in Victorian Britain. Through a combination of intensive and extensive reading, I demonstrate that many working-class men failed to live up to expectations as breadwinners, and I explore the ramifications of that failure for the women and children with whom they lived.

Clothing Inventions as Acts of Citizenship? The Politics of Material Participation, Wearable Technologies, and Women Patentees in Late Victorian Britain

This article is about clothing inventions, material participation, and acts of citizenship. I explore how pioneering Victorian women at the turn of the last century inventively responded via clothing to restrictions to their (physical and ideological) freedom of movement. While the bicycle is typically celebrated as a primary vehicle of women’s emancipation at that time, I argue that inventive forms of clothing, such as convertible cycling skirts, also helped women make claims to rights and privileges otherwise legally denied to their sex. I ask: Do clothing inventions create possibilities to act differently? Can they be thought of as wearable technology, and in what ways do they (and their invention) enact political concerns? Might convertible cycling skirts be considered “acts of citizenship?” Throughout, I mobilize concepts of multiplicity, in-betweenness, and ambiguity to make a case for the relevance of clothing research for science and technology studies.

John Leech and "Punch" - Tattooing the Story of an Age in a 'Newspaperized World'

As tattoos are both drawing and text that imprint the epidermis in inky arabesques of Delphic symbolism, Punch or The London Charivari acted, for more than one-hundred and sixty-one years (1841-2002) as the sharply witty, bitterly satirical chronicle of its own time. With a weekly circulation of approximately 50,000 – 60,000 issues in the mid-Victorian period, Punch became one of the most influential journalistic witnesses in mid-Victorian Britain, renowned for its unique sense of humour, audacious approach to current social and political matters and, most of all, for an unprecedented mastery of caustic illustrations, in a fresh approach to capture and caricaturise the spirit of the epoch, equally unprecedented in its dynamism and expansion. Although throughout the 1840s the magazine built its popularity more on political analysis than on satirical drawing, ”Punch's Pencillings” would turn the magazine into a vivid fresco, whose inimitable touch and magnetism have come to be osmotically associated with John Leech (1817-1864). With his undeniably remarkable artistic touch he managed not only to define the overall architecture of the magazine, but also to create a new understanding of humorous drawings, introducing the world to the concept of 'cartoon' as we all know it today. This article examines a selection of his three-thousand drawings published in Punch, in an attempt to recompose, through curved charcoal lines, the jigsaw of what Henry James coined as “newspaperized world,” at times when, as Lucy Brown argues, Britain was forging the modern concept of news. It is not only the social, cultural and political milieu that interests us, but also the extratextual implications of a visual appearance and narrative that pervaded the literary scene, as nineteenth-century journalism shared its boundaries with the realm of literary fiction.

Beyond the Threshold – Autobiography, Dialogic Interaction, and Conversion in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s and W. Abdullah Quilliam’s Poetry

The intertwinement of poetic life writing and theological reflections has a long-standing history in British literature. This paper shows how two Victorian poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. Abdullah Quilliam – use dialogic strategies to establish an autobiographic voice, which becomes an essential poetic means of the text. Through the representation of dialogic encounters, the poems establish an autobiographic mode of speaking, which is used to articulate individual conversion experiences and to negotiate conversion as an encounter with God. Based on the works of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I will show how a dynamic understanding of text and conversion experience is essential to a reading that seeks to explore the poetic construction of Hopkins’s as well as Quilliam’s works. The representation of the dynamic encounter of the self and the Divine in the contact zone of the text provides a frame in which the authors locate themselves with regard to the religious majority of Victorian Britain. The texts link the spiritual journey of conversion to the self as being caught in the world, responding to God’s call as an answer to the world’s condition.