Translations are often imagined, through spatial metaphors, to expand fields of interest, to broaden national literatures, or to bridge diverse cultural traditions. This essay considers a few nineteenth-century views on translation to show how intellectual expansions are indelibly linked to material ones, and to suggest a more complex critical perspective on the layers of historicity and self-interest involved in translations.

In this essay, I argue for the importance of employing the concept of the urban when analyzing Victorian Britain, given the status of the British Isles as the most urbanized place on the planet during the nineteenth century.

Human life under Queen Victoria was built on—or, more accurately, with—vegetables, from sugarcane, tea, and spices to cotton and indigo, tobacco and opium poppies. While the intricate and multiple economies of some of these vegetable staples have been explored in considerable detail, the highly uneven power dynamics of the Victorians’ complex, drawn-out encounters with the vegetable world mostly continue to be glossed over in simplistic terms of human appropriation and control. This essay proposes “vegetable” as a heuristic for critically engaging plants and other nonanimal growy things as sources of action in Victorianist scholarship. Drawing on thinking from the interdisciplinary field of critical plant studies, I argue that human life and ideas cannot be thought apart from vegetable materialities, especially during the Victorian period. The high degree to which human history was entangled in the vegetable world, I suggest, renders a “vegetable” heuristic indispensable to Victorianist scholarship, especially in the struggle to come to terms with its imperial inheritance.

This keyword essay on "women" responds to heated debates surrounding the term “pregnant person” in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision and argues for the continued usefulness of “women” to Victorian studies. While “pregnant person” allows institutions and thinkers to signal their recognition that the population requiring reproductive services includes trans men and nonbinary people, the curtailment of reproductive rights is often fueled by misogyny, which cannot be conceptualized without “women” as a category. Here, we are witnessing the reemergence of a field of discursive tension: between the coalitional power of the term “women” as used by feminists, on one hand, and the feminist goal to normalize inclusive language to honor and make visible marginalized experiences, on the other. We want to highlight that, first, such categories need not be mutually exclusive and that, second, the category “women” remains relevant to Victorian studies. We advocate not for the ascendancy of the term “women,” nor its dominance over other, crucial terms such as “trans” and “queer,” but simply for keeping “women” in play. Doing so makes space for strategic forms of coalition, historically precise scholarship, the recognition of trans women's identities, and intersectional analyses.