DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI and his artistic circle are emerging as privileged sites of modernist genesis. Studies by Jessica Feldman (Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience) and Allison Pease (Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity) include Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, respectively, in their reassessments of modernism. In a complementary move, Jerome McGann argues in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost that Rossetti's art anticipates Imagism (44) and is characterized by a “hyper-realism that anticipates certain Postmodern styles” (32). Such work implicitly questions, in Feldman's words, the narratives of “strife, loss, [and] rupture” (4) that have been told about modernism's relationship with its predecessors. By linking nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists in a historical trajectory of aesthetic change, as Pease does, or by effacing the historical through a “web” of Victorian modernism, as Feldman does, it becomes possible to see new relations among authors previously separated by critical practice. Rossetti and associates enjoy a new spotlight as they become modern through their aesthetic productions and domestic arrangements.

THOMAS MITCHELL (1792–1855), explorer and Surveyor-General in New South Wales between 1828 and 1855, was a talented and competent draughtsman who was responsible for the original sketches and even some of the lithographs he used to illustrate his two journals of exploration, published in 1838 and 1848. In this paper, I will be concerned with the 1838 journal, entitled Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with descriptions of the recently explored region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales. On the whole, it is a detailed and lavishly illustrated account of the land Mitchell encountered, along with its inhabitants and natural history. My particular interest is in offering an explanation for differences between a sepia sketch depicting a cave at Wellington, NSW, that Mitchell prepared as one of the illustrations for geological material included in this journal, and the final lithograph.

ELIZABETH GASKELL'S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS, often considered her finest and most psychologically complex novel, tells its story through narrative indirection–what Gaskell's heroine Molly Gibson identifies in a conversation late in the novel as telling a story with a “mental squint; the surest way to spoil a narration” (623; ch. 58). In this conversation, Molly is conscious of her audience–her admiring and encouraging aunts and her less admiring and less encouraging stepmother. Like Gaskell, Molly is conscious of the presence of a “critical listening.” Thus Molly selects which details of her visit to the Towers, the manor of the largest landowners in her town, she will relate. In examining the use of details, of particulars, in Victorian and Modernist poetry, Carol Christ makes clear that what is at stake is “not whether literature should contain detail but what the significance of the detail should be, and consequently what the criteria for its selection are” (4). Gaskell's realist domestic fiction delights in detail. Yet Gaskell has been taken to task by such critics as Virginia Woolf for an incidental and excessive use of detail, detail that for Woolf represents the mid-Victorian novelist's inability to select what is important in rendering reality. The aesthetic problem with detail, Naomi Schor explains, lies in the way that detail subverts internal hierarchic ordering by blurring the lines between the foreground and the background, the principle and the incidental (20–21). Schor's explanation of this internal subversion is useful for opening up Gaskell's use of detail in Wives and Daughters.

MR. TULLIVER DRAWS LITTLE ATTENTION from critics of The Mill on the Floss compared to his children, Maggie and Tom, and his finances are hardly ever looked at in any detail, just as other sections of George Eliot's novel that concern economics are not. Yet George Eliot says Mr. Tulliver has his tragedy, as do his daughter and son, and it is precisely Mr. Tulliver's money trouble, his bankruptcy, that sets the condition for the troubles of the next generation. I seek to trace a narrative logic for a novel that has seemed to many to strain plot coherence, and I do so by an economic analysis that allows a link to be drawn between such seemingly disparate tragedies as a father's financial ruin and death and his children's drowning, with the sister giving up love then life itself to reclaim her brother's favor, seeking in vain to rescue him from a flood.

IF SCHOLARS have a role model, he might be Umberto Eco's Brother William of Baskerville. Certainly our notion of the activity of scholarship–an investigator reading in a great library, alive to the treasures collected there–altered little from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and still persists at the beginning of the twenty-first; but by the end of this century, the practice of scholarship will have changed utterly, and the scholar will require quite different skills from those that graduate students are being equipped with today.

WHEN SIKES AND NANCY RECAPTURE OLIVER, in Dickens's Oliver Twist, intending to return him to the gang of thieves, Sikes warns Oliver against crying out to passersby, announcing that his dog will go for Oliver's throat if he so much as speaks one word. Looking at the dog, who is eyeing Oliver and growling and licking his lips, “with a kind of grim and ferocious approval,” Sikes tells Oliver, “He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!” (109; ch. 16). Sikes of course simply intends to say that his dog is as good as human, but Dickens's joke, in the context of the novel, is a chilling one. Sikes's bloodthirsty dog is as willing as the novel has shown many a professed Christian to be to exercise brute power over the weak and helpless, to drive Oliver into a life of crime, and to commit physical violence against him. In the course of the novel, Dickens shows what professed Christians have been willing to do to the poor and invites his readers to contemplate what they as Christians should instead be willing to do. Oliver Twist is of course deeply concerned with the condition of England's poor, and Dickens invokes the idea of Christianity as a rhetorical tool through which to make the social commentary that is at the novel's moral center.

…the ancient metaphor of the lean and the fat, the eaters and the eaten, still haunts the frame of political discourse.

—Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne

Space–my space–is not the context of which I constitute the textuality: instead, it is first of all my body, and then it is my body's counterpart or “other,” its mirror-image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or begets my body on the one hand, all other bodies on the other.

—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY is an important period in the history of psychiatry. According to the accepted narrative about the development of psychiatry as a field, in October of 1793, Philippe Pinel freed the patients at Bicêtre, the hospital for the insane in Paris. This act “heralded a new attitude to the insane,” as Pinel “abolished brutal repression” and “replaced it by a humanitarian medical approach” (Hunter 603). The French physician's approach to madness was officially brought to English soil when his text, A Treatise on Insanity, was translated into English in 1806 by D. D. Davis. His methods then began to appear in English practice and positively bloomed by mid century, particularly in the form of moral management, which advocated freeing patients of physical restraints and emphasizing their abilities to monitor their own behavior, while re-educating them about social mores and expectations (Showalter 27). The period from 1790 to 1850 has been called “the birth of psychiatry” (Donnelly viii).

IN AN EARLY VERSION of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford sketches, “The Last Generation of England” (1849), the narrator expresses a “wish…to put upon record some of the details of country town life,…for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing” (319). Before she begins her ethnographic preservation project, however, the narrator provides a disclaimer, suggesting the difficulty of categorizing the various aspects of what she is about to write: “As for classing the details with which I am acquainted under any heads, that will be impossible from their heterogeneous nature; I must write them down as they arise in my memory” (319). She then goes on to provide precisely what she claims is impossible–a categorical litany of the local inhabitants, beginning with the daughters of “very old” families who, “if unmarried, retired to live in–on their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there” (319). The reader is quickly taken through the town's social register, from “widows of the cadets of these same families,” to “professional men and their wives,” to a “grade lower…a class of single or widow ladies,” and on “[b]elow again,” to “the shopkeepers,” “the usual respectable and disrespectable poor,” and “a set of young men, [hanging about] ready for mischief and brutality” (319–20). Through her description, the narrator performs a double disavowal; heterogeneity prevents classification, but that very heterogeneity is itself what produces the need to classify. The rural society that serves as a precursor to Cranford (1851–53) represents a diversity that must be categorized–its hierarchy organized according to its uniqueness of place. Rendered as particular, readily-identifiable positions within the eccentric space of provincial English society, Cranford's denizens are inscribed through the Victorian fascination with taxonomy–a fascination with the seemingly paradoxical possibilities of “classing the details.”

WITH THESE ESSAYS, Victorian Literature and Culture begins a regular feature, “Victorians Live,” whose subject is how the Victorians still “live,” how they remain “live,” lively, alive. The focus is the intersection of the world of Victorian scholarship that the readers of VLC inhabit, with the larger world of representation. For, quite remarkably, in our globalized time, the Victorians remain “in”–from museum blockbusters to specialized exhibitions, from home decoration to popular fiction and graphic novels, from Masterpiece Theatre to Hollywood retellings of canonical novels. Rather than assuming an abyss between serious academic pursuits and the unserious non-academic world, Victorians Live seeks to chart the complex and ongoing dynamic wherein academic reinterpretations of the past, albeit in unexpected ways and with considerable time lags, shape the popular vision of the nineteenth century, and conversely, how contemporary social concerns as well as market demands on publishers and museums shape scholarship.

INTEREST IN VICTORIAN natural history illustration has burgeoned in recent years. Along with handsome, informative shows at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (“Picturing Natural History”), at the American Philosophical Society (“Natural History in North America, 1730–1860”), and at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne (“Nature's Art Revealed”), the year 2003 saw an entire conference devoted to the subject in Florence, Italy. In 2004, the eastern United States was treated to two more fauna- and flora-inspired shows, both dealing specifically with nineteenth-century British science and illustration.

AN EXHIBITION of Samuel Butler's photography in Gallery Sixteen, an elegant rotunda room just off the entrance to the Tate Britain, offered a rare opportunity to see some of the photography of the author of Erewhon and to contemplate how Victorian photographic realism fares in the setting of a modern museum. The exhibition, celebrating the centenary of Butler's death, ran from November 2002 to May 2003 and was made up of thirty-five framed photographs, some of them digitally touched up by Dudley Simons, and an assortment of photobooks and editions of Butler's self-illustrated volumes. It was developed by Tate curator Richard Humphreys and Butler scholar Elinor Shaffer, with the support of librarian Mark Nicholls from St. John's College at Cambridge, which houses most of Butler's extensive photographic work in its special collections. Titled “Samuel Butler and the Ignorant Eye,” after Shaffer's notion in her Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer, and Art Critic (1988) that Butler's photography renders “the eye of the viewer … ignorant and open” (229), the black-and-white secularism of Butler's work offered a startling change in imagery from the intense colorism of “Rossetti and Medievalism,” the exhibit that preceded it in Gallery sixteen.

EXPOSED: THE VICTORIAN NUDE, an extensive exhibition initiated by and first shown at Tate Britain in 2002, and The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber, a best-selling novel set in Victorian times and published in the same year, illustrate the interchange of the scholarly and the popular, more particularly how the recent rich work in Victorian sexuality, familiar to readers of this journal, informs and is transformed within blockbuster museum shows and popular fiction. Both exhibition and novel shed some light on the question of how the Victorians have become so sexy.

THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS AGO, in the United States at least, we confidently used the terms “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow” to describe not only reading matter but all sorts of cultural artifacts; and we generally assumed that the terms described quality or value as well as defining the social and intellectual class of people who chose one instead of the others. When it came to the study of British literature, we learned that the novel and the popular novel were (in the beginning) one and the same: that when the fictional prose narrative became a recognized literary form in English it was distinguished by its commercial character and its wide readership. Novels were the reading of the middle classes and particularly of women, tainted both by gender and by the disrepute attached by writing with an eye on public reception rather than artistic integrity. By the 1840s, however, novels had become a vehicle for serious thought. For a very short time, best-selling authors were also great writers. A serious novelist could speak with a voice of cultural authority–and also earn a substantial income. There were, of course, light and ephemeral fictions (and whole classes of sub-literature such as penny dreadfuls and cheap romances), but in the middle of the nineteenth century, we once learned, it was generally assumed that a book read by a great many people was probably worth reading.