British Women Wanted

This essay brings together three areas that until fairly recently had received scant attention from scholars of the British Empire: female emigration, ‘white settler colonies’, and emigration literature. In particular, it examines the generic innovations of Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, and Gertrude Page, the former a self-identified ‘English South African’ and the latter two authorial informants, British authors who spent time in southern Africa and wrote about the region as insiders. These writers, I argue, bolstered female, even feminist, subjectivity through generic innovation that is an effect of the translocal. Employing new fictional forms—the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, and the empire romance—to solve markedly gendered problems, they not only imagine new spaces for settler women beyond the matrimonial and the maternal; they also anticipate generic developments generally associated with the metropole.

Materiality in Theory

The role that things, commodities, and ‘reification’ played in the writing of Marx and Dickens—as well as in the daily practice of nineteenth-century Britons—explains the Victorianist claim to intellectual priority when it comes to ‘thing theory’. Yet it is not easy to find helpful paradigms for explaining the distinctiveness of how Victorian thinkers make sense of the materiality of their habitus. Recent philosophical ‘object-centred’ approaches are generally unproductive when applied to the literary realm, while the anthropological bias towards rendering all study of objects the study of their social/communal function misses important, and distinctive, aesthetic features. Recent work by Isobel Armstrong, Leah Price, and others, however, suggests one approach: making sense of Victorian materiality and Victorian conceptions of materiality by considering Victorian books as the medium upon which representation occurs as well as a potential subject of such representation.

Introduction

This Introduction explores the vexed term ‘Victorian literary culture’ by revisiting the origins of today’s disciplinary map in the Victorian period. It explains current uneasiness with the idea of ‘the literary’ by retracing its associations with the humanist writings of Arnold and Leavis and the subsequent reaction against humanism which propelled cultural studies, critical theory, and contemporary interdisciplinarity. It argues for the reintegration and re-evaluation of the ideas of ‘the literary’ and ‘literary culture’ into prevailing interdisciplinary practice and defences of the arts and humanities. This should not signal a return to a naïve humanism, apoliticism, or ahistoricism but can emerge from the ‘hermeneutics of integrity’ that John sees as prevalent in today’s Victorian studies. As literary culture has provided Victorian studies with much of its base as well as its baggage, it is important to allow the prodigal idea of the literary to rebalance our academic and public conversations.

Unspeakable Desires

This chapter explores how certain forms of desire are silenced by culture and convention, and how these desires, whilst they may be expressed through glance or action, can be difficult to express in verbal form. Chief among these desires are ones predicated on same-sex attraction, and both male homosexual and lesbian desires—and attitudes and legislation relating to them—are placed in the context of changing attitudes towards sexuality in Victorian society. The chapter also examines forms of desire that are manifested through such activities as flogging or the consumption of pornography. But the main emphasis falls on queer sexualities and relationships and on their expression in fiction and poetry. The idea that style itself may be understood as a form of queer expression is investigated, and the warning issued that we must be careful not to project our own twenty-first-century desires and forms of identification onto Victorian practices.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore

Victorian natural science is not something separate from culture and social life, but integral to Victorian literary culture broadly defined. This is particularly important to the Victorian period because it was during the nineteenth century that the professionalization of science occurred; at the same time a vibrant popular science existed. Natural history is part of a broader landscape of scientific culture in the nineteenth century beyond the poles of the ‘scientific naturalists’ such as Charles Darwin and the Anglican ‘gentlemen of science’. A particular nineteenth-century version of natural theology persisted at least until mid-century and even as late as the 1870s, manifesting especially in popular natural histories. One specific genre was the seashore natural history, in which there is a blend of empirical observation and theology, especially in the work of Philip Henry Gosse.

Beyond Two Cultures

As some of the key arguments of literature and science studies have become widely accepted and adopted by Victorian studies at large, it is necessary to reconsider a number of methodological issues underpinning the historicist study of literature and science in this period. This essay discusses some of the methodological challenges which face the field in a changing research landscape. The essay asks what, if anything, distinguishes nineteenth-century literature and science studies from other existing and potential interdisciplinary historicist approaches. It outlines and critiques some of the key models used in this field, especially the ‘one culture’ and ‘two-way traffic’ models, and explores two fundamental problems in the explanatory procedures of literature and science studies: problems of analogy and causation.

The New Woman and Her Ageing Other

This essay focuses on the powerful grip anxieties about ageing had on the increasingly diverse field of texts associated with the New Woman. A number of women poets from the period seem uniquely aware of the potential consequences for single women when they transition from being a ‘young person’ to being a spinster. Novelists of the period emphasized effects of ageing not only as a physical phenomenon, but also as an affective, social, economic, and relational influence that affected a character’s identity and options as profoundly as gender and sexuality. Nowhere is the fear of ageing more prominent than in those novels where New Women characters and plots intersect with late nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, whether the Gothic setting is the urban or actual jungle.

Science and Periodicals

Periodicals offer a wonderful guide to the Victorian age, and to the ways in which science entered into the general culture of the time. This study considers a range of different kinds of periodicals, and the diverse ways in which they engaged with contemporary science. Although evolutionary theory was obviously a significant presence, it formed only one part of a complex picture. In the literary-oriented periodicals, for example, we find particular emphasis placed on the ways in which scientific thinking appeared to intersect with the interests of fiction and poetry, whether in theories of selfhood or personal responsibility, or the relations between science and religion. There was also, more generally, a fascination with new inventions, and the possibilities opened up by new technologies, such as the ingenious suggestion for a ‘whispering machine’. Periodicals offer an intricate picture of a society grappling with rapid social and cultural change, charged with the immediacy which comes from their serial and time-bound nature. In their integration of cutting-edge science with the latest fiction or social commentary they established a model we could do well to emulate.

Liberalism and Literature

Liberalism in the sense of a political party did not fully exist until the years between 1847 and 1868, when the Whigs transitioned into Liberals. By the late 1850s, the Liberal Party had become a ruling force in British politics. Yet, in 1886 when the Liberals split over Irish home rule, the demise of liberalism as a coherent platform was already clear. One result of this short-lived history is a striking difference in terminology on different sides of the Atlantic. Liberal political philosophy, however, encompasses diverse referents including classical republican, Scottish Enlightenment, and German-Romantic influences. Scholars who tender specific arguments about liberalism should specify the dimensions of thinking or practice to which they refer. While ‘liberal’ discourse is, thus, contextual and multivalent, the specifically literary reference points of the term are hardly reducible to political platforms, economic doctrines, philosophical stances, or ideological agendas.

Victorian Theatre

The theatre provided Victorian women with a rare opportunity to experience as actresses the exhilaration of independence and power, but at the same time conspired in reproducing repressive codes of gender in both the theatre and society. Men, at once attracted and made anxious by powerful actresses, reassured themselves with a defensive rhetoric that constructed the actress as an exceptional case having little or nothing in common with ‘real’ women like their own wives and daughters. The executive functions of theatre manager and playwright were culturally gendered as requiring ‘masculine’ qualities of mind: no plays by women of the time have broken into the canon of English drama. Nevertheless the considerable achievements of Victorian women like Elizabeth Robins deserve our attention—women who not only wrote and produced plays, but sought to revolutionize the theatre by tempering its commercialism and motives of self-interest while enhancing and broadening opportunities for women.