Simon Reader's Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style, as I discuss below, pushes us to rethink how we understand notes in the nineteenth century and in our own. I will begin with the contemporary implications of Reader's argument by pairing it with Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study. Both books foreground aspects of the research and writing life that have always supported the publish-or-perish research agenda and yet have seemed instrumental or ephemeral.

While analysis of the figure of the “typewriter girl” abounds in literary scholarship, few have yet taken the real typewriting women, those individuals involved in the production of literature, as serious subjects of literary study. This article focuses on one such typist, Ethel Kate Dickens (1864–1936), in an examination of the types of intellectual and social work that constituted her literary-adjacent career. Ethel Dickens was not only a representative “independent literary typist” at the turn of the twentieth century, she was also the granddaughter of the “inimitable” Charles Dickens, a business owner, and a playwright; she typed for G. B. Shaw, J. M. Barrie, and other notables. Leveraging evidence that includes Barrie's “The Twelve Pound Look,” archival letters, historic typewriting manuals, and a wide array of periodicals, I argue that reevaluating her work as specifically literary labor recuperates significant processes that are frequently omitted from official accounts of literary history. Recovering the interpretive and transformative processes of Ethel Kate Dickens's professional literary copying thus expands what it might mean to make and experience literature, and to have literary value, beyond the persistent paradigms of “originality” that continue to structure literary studies today.

One of the most heated areas of discussion around monumental sculpture today is whether problematic past statues should be torn down. But what has been missing from conversations is a sense of prehistory: a sense, even among the monument-mad Victorians, that a time could come when statues from the past might adversely affect life in the present. From logistical concerns that too many statues would choke up flow through city streets, to concerns that effecting too many statues of unworthy people might take up limited space better saved for future worthies, to anxieties about visual distraction, plenty of commentators argued for a moratorium on new production. Others went further and proposed destruction. In his satirical 1872 work Erewhon, Samuel Butler would imagine a society that memorialized its dead not with gravestones but with life-size statues, and imagine a time when “the city had become so overrun with these pests, that there was no way of getting about.” He would also envision that the only solution was wholesale demolition. The scenario he sketched may have seemed one of the least hyperbolic of any in the novel, and the least foreign to his contemporaries.

While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novella Teleny (1893). The authors of Teleny invoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments, Teleny offers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated as unnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Teleny presents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.

In their field-shaking 2020 essay, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong set out to “think carefully and deliberately about how we can develop a truly relational thinking and set of practices that engage scholarship across fields and disciplines, enabling a cross-fertilization of ideas, a coalition-based politics and activism, and even a refashioning of academic structures to better serve the purposes of equity and justice.” Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie make a similarly powerful call in their introductory essay, “Widening the Nineteenth Century,” for a 2021 special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. This “widening” occurs across different fields and dimensions, stemming from a “wish to examine the interpretive and methodological possibilities that emerge when we expand our objects of study beyond what has been ordained by the temporal—and spatial—purview of the British nineteenth century, which is to say that we wish to put further pressure on the geotemporal linkage that has largely tethered studies of the nineteenth century to the geographic confines of Britain.” My sense is that central to these projects to “undiscipline” and “widen” the Victorian field should be a reexamining of our reading practices as scholars. What do we read, and when? Do we stick to our “subfields,” however we define these, or do we venture elsewhere? And what does it look like to read “elsewhere” while continuing to produce meaningful scholarship?

To expand understanding of imbricated journalism and high aestheticism at the fin de siècle, this essay examines Vernon Lee's journalism and slow essay serials, a form spread over space (viz., different periodicals) and marked by irregular temporal issue of installments before finding new cohesion when retroactively constructed as a book. Lee's prolific periodical publication, especially her aesthetic criticism, is rarely approached as journalism. Newly available letters and Lee's negotiations with editors clarify the occluded history of Lee's journalism and her slow essay serials, a distinctive serial form at the fin de siècle, which this article conceptualizes in closing.

What does “decadence” mean? Does it mean anything at all? Is it sinister or irresistibly appealing? Regardless of the ambiguity that surrounds the word “decadence” (often with a small “d”), no one can deny that decadence (frequently with a capital “D,” especially when it alludes to the late nineteenth-century European cultural movement) has been sweeping the world of academic publishing. Seen from the perspective of 2022, the past few years appear to have been, at least among scholars, a decade of decadence. Joseph Bristow opens his chapter on “Female Decadence” for the 2016 volume The History of British Women's Writing, 1880–1920 by saying, “There is no question that by the mid-1890s one word had come to define avant-garde art and literature in Britain,” and that word was decadence. Judging by the recent proliferation of books and art exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic, history appears to be repeating itself and on a broader scale. Decadence is now defining, or at least preoccupying, many of us.

This essay utilizes the publication of the first scholarly edition of The French Revolution: A History (1837) as an occasion to reassess this thoroughgoingly radical—and puzzlingly neglected—masterpiece. It explores how Thomas Carlyle's maverick conceptions of sympathy and affect, the relationship of the individual and the collective, and narrative itself underlie the audacious stylistic innovations that characterize this singular text. Moreover, this paper interprets Carlyle's history as a chronicle of inverted utopianism; that is, an apocalyptic manifestation of what is nevertheless a properly utopian longing for heaven on earth. Thus read, The French Revolution offers perspective on our own volatile times as well as a promise—or perhaps a warning—that the insurrectionary struggle for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity is not over.