THE EAST END OF LONDON was not a common destination for the upper- or middle-class sightseer in the early nineteenth century. The requisite steamer ride down the Thames from London Bridge for the excursion out of the city to Greenwich would show, along the way, in the words of one tourist, “The Custom House and the Tower, the only prominent objects rising out of the dreary range of shabbiness which stretches along close to the water's edge” (Hawthorne 232–33). There was one exception to the habit of overlooking the East End: a significant proportion of the twenty-four million persons who passed through the Thames Tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe from 1827 to 1865 had indeed made the eastward excursion expressly for that purpose. Essential viewing at the time but little studied since, the history of the Thames Tunnel indicates the stakes and the consequences of remapping the urban topography of London during the era when middle-class tourism was being invented. Comprised of two 1200-foot-long arched passageways joined by a wall of open arches in an overall brickworked space of 22 1/2 feet high by 38 feet wide (Bobrick 58), the Tunnel was unique among the obligatory sights of the city in that it was also a practical thoroughfare employed as such almost wholly by the working classes. It was open twenty-four hours a day, and, as one visitor noted, it offered the unusual experience of emerging “in the midst of one of the most unintelligible, forlorn, and forsaken districts of London or the world” (Catlin 2: 112–13; qtd. in Altick 373), the docklands and slums of the East End. Through a half-century as a symbolic hub of London life from the years of its design and excavation (1824–43) to its conversion to a railway tunnel on the East London Line in 1869, the Thames Tunnel mobilized the tensions in the modernizing city between technological progress and social repression into a dense network of underground myths.

VANITY FAIRIS A NOVEL OF ENIGMAS. In particular, after finishing the book, readers have often wondered why Thackeray refuses to tell us clearly whether or not Becky actually kills Joseph Sedley in chapter 67–a question recently given prominence by John Sutherland as one of the “Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature” (66–72). The explanation most commonly given for Thackeray's evasiveness on this point is that such unanswered questions in Vanity Fair are part of the artistry of this unconventional work of fiction, a book that A. E. Dyson has described as “surely one of the world's most devious novels” (76). This view of Vanity Fair as a novel of narrative legerdemain–intended to keep the reader constantly alert and pondering what is being shown (or concealed)–is certainly true. However, an additional possible explanation for Thackeray's ambiguity on the subject of Jos's death also ought to be considered. This explanation lies in Thackeray's horrified reaction to the public execution of François Benjamin Courvoisier on 6 July 1840. The echoes between Thackeray's appalled description of the events of that morning and his subsequent famous novel suggest that he privately conceived of Becky as murdering Jos. The echoes also suggest that one reason why Thackeray handled this fictional murder obliquely is that, by the time of writing Vanity Fair, he had come to believe that, although executions might occur, they should not take place in public. Exploring the subtle connections between Thackeray's profound revulsion at the death of Courvoisier and Thackeray's later treatment of Jos's death gives deeper meaning to the intentional ambiguities in chapter 67. These connections make the ambiguities surrounding the death of Jos part of a widespread debate over capital punishment in the 1840s and have significant ramifications in terms of the parallel between public executions and pornography and with regard to the role of Becky in this novel.

IN HIS LATE PLAY, Sardanapalus (1821), Byron repeatedly presents questions of legacy, as the Assyrian monarch struggles to determine what his reign will mean to future eras. The drama ends with Sardanapalus and his beloved slave, Myrrha, atop a suicidal pyre meant to destroy the palace as the rebellious satraps close in–the pyre also to be the king's final monument, the act by which posterity will remember him. Indeed, he imagines his flaming destruction will produce “a light/To lesson ages, rebel nations, and/Voluptuous princes,” even though “Time shall quench full many/A people's records, and a hero's acts;/Sweep empire after empire, like this first/Of empires, into nothing” (V.i.440–45). In the event, Sardanapalus's last words on the matter come in the form of a satire on the Egyptian pyramids, those proud Ozymandian monuments which time has turned into sites of confusion: [I]n this blazing palace,And its enormous walls of reeking ruin,We leave a nobler monument than EgyptHath piled in her brick mountains, o'er dead kings,Or kine, for none know whether those proud pilesBe for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis:So much for monuments that have forgottenTheir very record! (V.i.480–87)

IN 1895, GRANT ALLEN PUBLISHED A NEW WOMAN NOVEL entitled The Woman Who Did. This treatise-like novel appeared as part of the Keynotes Series, a group of ideologically progressive texts published by John Lane for Bodley Head in the 1890s. As Margaret Diane Stetz writes, Lane made this series “a haven for ‘New Woman’ fiction, naturalistic short stories, and ‘decadent’ poetry and art” (72). Marketed as status and sex objects (81), many of the thirty-three novels and short-story collections that make up the series concern themselves with New Woman issues such as marriage and female sexuality. Lane had taken the name for this series from George Egerton's Keynotes (1893), a collection of short stories told from the perspective of an emancipated woman. The Woman Who Did, published two years later, also featured a New Woman and became the most notorious book of the series. Combining a free-love, anti-marriage message with a tragic plot, Allen's novel focuses on a clergyman's daughter, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry the father of her child, Alan Merrick, on feminist principles. Unwilling to enter an institution that she compares to “vile slavery” (43), she chooses to live unmarried with her lover and daughter until his death. She withstands the calumny of family and friends and years of grieving and penury only to discover in the end that her daughter rejects her feminism and views her illegitimacy not as the “supreme privilege” her mother believed it to be, but rather as a “curse” (132). In a way typical of New Woman novels, the story ends with the heroine's suicide.

HOW DID IT COME TO THIS? How did the precious coin of the sovereign become the twaddle of misguided preachers? Where did condescension go wrong?

C. L. (CATHERINE LOUISA) PIRKIS'S “The Murder at Troyte's Hill,” second in her series of stories about Detective Loveday Brooke, begins with Brooke's boss debriefing her on a case: “Griffiths, of the Newcastle Constabulary, has the case in hand…. Those Newcastle men are keen-witted, shrewd fellows, and very jealous of outside interference. They only sent to me under protest, as it were, because they wanted your sharp wits at work inside the house” (528). This is a typical beginning for one of Brooke's adventures, which were published in the London magazine Ludgate Monthly in 1893 and 1894. As one of the earliest professional female detectives in English literary history, Brooke's career was marked by conflicts with territorial male officers and the ever-present pressure to keep her detective work “inside the house.” Emerging at a historical moment when understandings of women, criminality, and law enforcement were rapidly changing in Britain, Pirkis's stories offer an interpretation of these intersecting cultural shifts that is surprisingly different from her contemporaries. In a decade rife with scientific interrogation into the nature of criminality, such as in the work of Havelock Ellis and Francis Galton, detective fiction of the 1890s tended to mimic scientific discourse in its representations of criminals. The Brooke stories, however, challenge such conceptions of deviance and reveal the poverty of their underlying understandings of crime as well as gender.

“‘LETTERS!’ … ‘I BELIEVE HE DREAMS IN LETTERS!’” so exclaims Betsey Trotwood of Mr. Micawber, the epistolary aficionado of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (664; ch. 54). David's aunt Betsey is not the only one to wonder at Micawber's prolific, albeit prolix, nature. His letters have made him a favorite of nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers alike; his “in short” has become one of the most memorable Dickensian tag-lines. But however much attention Micawber's epistolary endeavors garner, this notice fails to raise him to the position of respected writer–the position reserved for the eponymous hero of the novel. In the usual line of thinking, David stands as the ideal literary man while Micawber molders in the world of fantasy and comedy in which J. B. Priestley, James Kincaid, and J. Hillis Miller so securely position him.

Does a theory of literary kinds involve the supposition that every work belongs to a kind? The question is not raised in any discussion we know. If we were to answer by analogy to the natural world, we should certainly answer ‘yes’: even the whale and the bat can be placed; and we admit of creatures who are transitions from one kingdom to another.

—René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1942)

His anatomy was philosophic, or transcendent, because transcending the vision of the eye, it had the vision of the mind, seeing what the eye alone could never see.

—G. H. Lewes, “Life and Doctrine of Geoffroy St. Hilaire”

Scientific material does not have clear boundaries once it enters literature.

—Dame Gillian Beer, Open Fields

GLOSSING FREUD'S FAMOUS EXAMPLE of “shine on the nose/glance at the nose” (Glanz auf der Nase), Christopher Pye suggests that the familiar account of the fetish (as a simulacrum standing in for a missing object) does not capture what is exemplary about the example, that is, the way the act of looking is crystallized in the object seen, a shine equated with a glance. In that conflation, one can recognize the ultimate grounds for the fetish's captivating properties, as well as the entire economy of repudiation and renewed loss it embodies. Not simply a reassuring compromise object in place of a loss, the fetish actively plays out and shores against that originating split in the experience of being inscribed within– ‘fascinated’ by–the gaze as it derives from elsewhere. (176 n.17)

JANE EYREIS A NOVEL INTENSELY CONCERNED with reading and being read. It is a text fixated on acts of literacy and states of legibility, and it produces reading as a compelling, multivalent locus for narrative pleasures and for the articulation of desire. Jane Eyre grants the greatest possible significance to every form of literacy, frequently structuring its articulations of the erotic through reading: reading books or watching others read them, successfully (or unsuccessfully) reading the faces and heads of others, and controlling or failing to command one's legibility. These many crucial literacies do not originate from a chance narrative enthusiasm, but are centrally linked to the novel's equally intense interest in the classificatory arrangements of phrenological systems. Phrenology, that famous nineteenth-century pseudo-science of reading, enables the production of the novel's multiple erotic strands, structuring not only a considerable portion of the heterosexual romance plot(s), but articulating and enabling the novel's female homoerotic dynamics, as well.

TERRY EAGLETON has suggested that “the mid-nineteenth century bourgeois state had problems in resolving its Oedipus complex” (76). Eagleton's semi-serious remark certainly holds true for nineteenth-century British culture, which, while supposedly patriarchal in its political structures, features a great number of significant literary narratives in which the paternal parent is either missing, dead, or never mentioned. The poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are no exception. Gerhard Joseph, Christopher Ricks, and Linda Shires, among others, turn to Freudian psychoanalysis, the Oedipal complex, and Freud's seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” for insight into why so many father figures are absent from Tennyson's work. Yet neither the Oedipus complex nor “melancholia” accounts for how these father figures, while literally absent, are nevertheless present and influential. Another model is needed to describe the relationship between Tennyson, the missing paternal figures of his narratives, and the age that he has come to represent.

LARGELY OVERLOOKED in Collins scholarship, the 1872 novel Poor Miss Finch: A Domestic Story describes the complicated relationships between a young blind woman, Lucilla Finch, and twin brothers, Oscar and Nugent Dubourg. Lucilla's blindness results in her aversion to dark colors, and as she and Oscar fall in love, he must deploy a series of elaborate deceptions in a desperate attempt to keep from her his own dark secret–that his skin has been turned blue by medication prescribed for his epileptic condition. Following an extraordinary operation, Lucilla's eyesight begins to return, and Oscar's carefully guarded secret of blueness threatens to destroy their relationship. The plot of Poor Miss Finch explores the ways in which Oscar hides his blueness from Lucilla as well as the duplicitous function of his twin, Nugent, who stands in for Oscar as Lucilla begins to regain her sight. At every turn, Poor Miss Finch mines issues of identity and investigates the ways in which identity becomes withheld and disclosed–closeted and uncloseted–through a series of spectacular deceptions that enable the keeping of secrets.

OVER THE COURSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, England saw the publication of numerous social instruction handbooks, household manuals, cookery books, and restaurant guides focusing on the proper methods for dining. These dining handbooks provide a systematic account of the most minute details for both attending and hosting a dinner party, including such information as how to word the invitations, ornament the table, order the courses, or arrange guests according to precedence. To the extent that formal dining becomes standardized in the conduct literature, a dining taxonomy begins to emerge–a classificatory system whereby formerly idiosyncratic aspects of this social experience are codified, or reduced to a code, and routinized, or rendered routine. While the content of handbooks (the social conventions) is arranged into a taxonomy, something more interesting can be seen to appear as well: conventions for the dining taxonomy itself. That is, within the large body of Victorian dining handbooks, there is not only a striking repetition of content from one handbook to the next, but also a repetition of narrative styles, patterns, and devices that imply that the procedures under discussion are universal phenomena, divorced from human agency, interpretation, and variable social circumstances. In other words, these handbooks render the conventions natural.

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, scientific taxonomies shaped fictional narratives in highly ambiguous ways. On the one hand, novels–to take the predominant literary genre of the time–invoked the language of science to lend their structures the authority of those models of rationality that seemed to provide the most credible explanations of the observable world. Quite naturally, the project of realism, in its search for verisimilitude, drew upon those explanatory schemas that seemed to offer the closest simulacra of the real. Yet the novels of the period also resisted the authority of the scientific discourses they incorporated. If scientific taxonomies tend toward aggregation–in other words, the fitting of newly discovered forms within classificatory systems of previously known structures–novels, it can be argued, tend toward disaggregation, the resistance of individual characters to those social categories that seek to contain them.

AFTER MINA HARKER awakens from Count Dracula's vampiric embrace, she asks the men around her, but more pointedly herself, “What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days?” (285, ch. 21). As she recounts this perverse seduction in her own words, however, she contradicts her earlier disavowal: “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (284). These conflicting statements capture the peculiar double bind with which Mina struggles throughout Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Many critics concentrate on Dracula himself and the men who do battle with him; interestingly, the novel also develops Mina's complex subjectivity through her unspoken but deep affinity with the vampire. Van Helsing's paranoid observation, “Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina, is changing” (319; ch. 24), epitomizes shifting cultural anxieties at the moment when a long-standing ideological conception of proper femininity comes under suspicious attack. Although nothing seems more natural to Mina than her desire to help her husband in the public sphere while maintaining an intimate friendship with Lucy Westenra in the private, these familiar roles become estranged by the new taxonomies of deviancy popularized during the late nineteenth century.

IN 1830, 57,000 PASSENGERS DEPARTED BRITISH PORTS for overseas destinations. By 1840, the figure had risen to 185,000; by 1850, it had reached 281,000, a five-fold increase in just twenty years. Although these figures relate to all departees, they nevertheless give some indication of the sheer scale of mid nineteenth-century emigration from Britain, and it should be no surprise that a sizeable industry developed to supply the growing number of passengers, to meet their victualling needs, provide tools, equipment, and accommodation, as well as information about prospective destinations. The emigrant's departure was urged on by an outpouring of enthusiastic writings in mainstream periodicals and newspapers, by emigrant handbooks, illustrated volumes, and hand-colored prints. These descriptions of new, alluring, distant lands were set off against equally stylized construals of the old country in which the relative independence available to colonial settlers was contrasted with the unfavorable situation many faced in Britain. Addressing himself to the agricultural laborer in 1843, for example, John Chase bade him scan the changeable British skies, consider the bitter winter, poor accommodation, endemic sickness, his wife and children starving, the apothecary's bill accumulating, while the tax gatherer and landlord hovered at the door. Then look at the Cape, Chase urged, with its celestial climate, where sickness was the exception, where doctors pined for want of patients and apothecaries were impoverished for want of custom, where the tax gatherer was never seen and the landlord was the emigrant himself (243–44).

IN KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885), H. Rider Haggard describes the journey of three robust English men who successfully penetrate a sexualized landscape in southern Africa, depicted as both the body of the long-dead Queen of Sheba and that of her contemporary, King Solomon. The three English adventurers, led by the narrator Allan Quatermain, climb “Sheba's breasts” (26; ch. 2), traverse her torso, and arrive finally at the location where diamonds are stored inside her cavernous body, in the space Haggard calls “King Solomon's treasure chamber” (27; ch. 2). Narrative desire and the mystery of the Jewish patriarch's ancient empire propel these men through a series of male bonding adventures that lead to their arrival and conquest of the famed mines, where they pocket diamonds “as large as pigeon-eggs” (225; ch. 17) and plot their escape from what they fear may be a sealed cave.

IN 1883, the American physician J. B. Mattison made the startling announcement that the majority of American morphine habitues were doctors and suggested that between thirty and forty percent of medical professionals were addicted (23). By 1909, an English addiction specialist had broadened the context and seemingly raised the ante, claiming “that the proportion of medical addicts to the total of cases is in some statistics as high as ninety per cent., and that one-fifth of the mortality in the profession is said to be caused by morphinism” (Jennings, The Morphia Habit v). Looking back in 1924, the German psychopharmacologist Louis Lewin referred to a “statistical table of [morphine] addicts, including all countries of the world,” which “gave 40.4 per cent doctors, 10.0 per cent doctors' wives” (54). Of course, all these data are somewhat questionable since reliable measures would have been all but impossible to obtain and the proportions surely varied over the periods and areas in question. But we can reasonably deduce at least this much: medical professionals were consistently the most prominent demographic group among morphine addicts in the developed western world after the middle of the nineteenth century.

Forgery is now considered an offence of the greatest magnitude;… In proportion, therefore, as a nation increases in wealth by buying and selling, it will magnify the criminality of a fraud by which buying and selling may be checked. The change of opinion will show itself in the penal laws, and in the not less deterrent force of social reprobation.

—Luke Owen Pike, History of Crime in England (1876)