ONE OF THE GIVENS OF NATURAL history is that it is the observation of wild nature. However, that way of stating the case establishes a boundary between nature and culture, wild and domestic, whereas humans, as Douglas Sackman observes, have shaped what they call nature “into forms that [are] valuable to themselves or others” (171). This shaping of nature is particularly true of William Bernard Tegetmeier's (1816–1912) lavishly illustrated The Poultry Book (1873). A new edition of a work that had sold for one shilling per part in fifteen monthly parts through 1866 to 1867, it carried thirty chromolithograph color plates and ran to three hundred and ninety-two pages. Texts like The Poultry Book belonged to the wider circulation of ideas between the discourses of art, literature, and science that led eventually both to the protection of birds in the wild (Kean 113–15) and to their increasingly scientific management in agriculture.

BOOKS ARE SOMETIMES published posthumously. In the nineteenth century, books were occasionally written posthumously when spiritualist mediums claimed to receive communications from the spirits of famous writers anxious to keep in touch with their public from beyond the grave. Oscar Wilde wrote his last book twenty-six years after his death, Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages (1926), edited by Hester Travers Smith, the medium who received the messages while in trance and inscribed them through the process known as “automatic writing.” The book was highly regarded in the spiritualist community, boasting a preface by Sir William Barrett, a famous physicist, a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and – along with a number of other illustrious men of science such as physicists Sir William Crookes and Oliver Lodge as well as biologist Alfred Russell Wallace – a convert to spiritualism.

“I READ THE PAPERS and have a little political world of my own.” So Margaret Harkness confided to her second cousin Beatrice Potter (who would later marry the Fabian Sidney Webb) in a letter sent in February 1880 (qtd. in Hapgood 130). Subsequently disavowed by her repressive father, an Anglican priest, because she was insufficiently subordinate to him, Harkness was still living at home at this time. Her social isolation, as well as her political frustration, is palpable. But if the tone of this apparently resigned statement is poignant, it is at the same time too defiant to be dismissed as self-pitying. Later in the 1880s she worked among the poor and unemployed in the East End of London, the environment that she explored in some seven novels written under the pseudonym “John Law,” from A City Girl (1887) to George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905). In this decade she also circulated, uneasily enough, in the Social Democratic Federation, a socialist organization dominated by the acolytes of Friedrich Engels, vainly searching for a progressive model of friendship that might alleviate her sense of alienation. Indeed, Harkness became a formidable activist as well as an impressive novelist. She seems however to have grown disillusioned with socialist politics in the 1890s and to have drifted into philanthropic activities instead (see Ledger 144).

THE VICTORIANS' PASSION FOR plants has been well established as a defining feature of the period, and scholars from the humanities and the sciences – from literature, history, anthropology, botany, art, and religion – have lavishly documented how this obsession pervaded every aspect of nineteenth-century British life, creating what was truly the golden age for the “Culture of Flowers,” to borrow the title of Jack Goody's ethnobotanical study tracing traditional and ceremonial uses of flowers through history and around the globe. As Brent Elliott argues, improvements in greenhouse design beginning in 1817 and the use of the Wardian case from the 1830s for transporting plants by ship led to an unprecedented number of plant introductions to England, especially those intended for ornamental purposes (8–13). Decorative plants either of the indigenous, old-fashioned varieties or exotic new species were now widely available and visible everywhere – in vast public garden beds or small cottage plots; in pots or cut arrangements in the homes and on the window sills of the middle class and the well-to-do; in theaters, meeting halls, and fashionable shops; in churches for weddings, funerals, and holidays; in the boutonnieres of dandies and at the wrists, bosoms, and in the hair of ladies; for sale on the streets in flower carts and stalls; and in the shops of the burgeoning florist trade.

THE VICTORIAN GARDEN BOOK ATTAINED its peak popularity and status with the publications of Gertrude Jekyll, who, beginning in 1899, brought forth a total of fourteen books. Like those of her Victorian predecessors, Jekyll's garden books raise a series of questions about what it means to represent nature, for they expose a conflict: that between the human desire to forge a respectful connection with nature as an equal and the desire to exercise control over it. On the one hand, Victorian garden books, including Jekyll's, sought to encourage human knowledge of and interaction with the natural world. They built on the popularity of eighteenth-century botanical studies by disseminating detailed information about plants and their ecological habitats, frequently expressing wonder at nature's manifold and seemingly limitless creativity (Gates 36; Shteir 64–68). These admiring representations of nature cumulatively suggest a complex understanding of matter as dynamic and even purposeful, and the accompanying Victorian promotion of gardening as a hands-on, salutary activity for all classes at least tacitly positioned human development as inherently physical (Longstaffe-Gowan 151). On the other hand, gardening books not only attempted to aestheticize and manage nature, exerting rhetorical and visual control over physically powerful forces, but they also helped to consolidate nature's status as a commodity in Western culture as a site designed to regenerate, sooth, instruct, or sustain humans. From a twenty-first century point of view, the garden book constitutes an acute nature-culture problem because it so obviously relates to the issue of authority, specifically that of the individual writer whose public voice derives from her demonstrated ability to tend and to interpret the physical world. As ecocritics and postcolonial scholars justly charge, nature too often gets reduced to passive matter that is both available for and amenable to human cultivation and advancement. The garden book seemingly promotes such assumptions through its emphasis on the pleasures attendant on careful management of nature and through its idealized presentation of the gardener as an exemplar of self-disciplined creativity.

THE NEW WOMAN was both a discursive formation and a figure produced by materialist history as a result of debates over marriage, sexualities, political rights, labor conditions, life styles, and fashion. Unnamed until 1893 (Tusan 169), the “New Woman” became a lively topic in the press only in 1894 (Schaffer, “‘Nothing’” 39–40), at which point the rhetoric aimed at actual women quickly transformed into attacks on or defense of a literary phenomenon – in part, Ann Ardis suggests, because a literary controversy was less threatening than the prospect of actual social change (12). The “‘props’” attributed to the New Woman by Punch, the preeminent periodical to construct the literary stereotype, included five defining activities: “She smoked, rode a bicycle, frequented women's clubs, read voraciously and wore bloomers” (Miles 247). Scholars have long acknowledged that the New Woman did not suddenly appear but had a pre-history dating back to the 1880s (e.g., Ledger 23). A crucial part of that pre-history in life and in print was the founding of the “Literary Ladies,” a women writers' dining club, in 1889. The club not only represented significant innovation in fin-de-siècle authorship but also, more crucially, precipitated in the press the “props” (bloomers excepted) that would typify – and target – the New Woman from 1894 onward.

ELIZABETH GASKELL SCHOLARS are well aware of the anger that Mary Barton evoked in some quarters of Manchester's industrial bourgeoisie. These scholars are also certainly familiar with the central document of this anger, a wide-ranging critique in which an anonymous “Correspondent” of the Manchester Guardian accuses the anonymous novelist not only of ignorance but also of distortions that amount to “a libel on the masters, merchants, and gentlemen of this city.” The correspondent, W. R. Greg, offers several lines of argument in support of this charge. I would like to take one of these as the opening evidence in my own argument. “In a truthful ‘tale of Manchester, or factory life,’” he remarks, “it appears very strange that no notice whatever is taken of what has been done by the masters for improving the condition of the workmen”; instead of “mechanics' institutions,” “libraries founded expressly for [the workers'] benefit,” and other “institutions [where] every stimulus is given to self-culture, to the expansion of the mind … to whatever will elevate the taste, refine the manners, [and] improve the moral character,” the reader sees only the harsh effects of “comparatively uneducated and ignorant” factory masters. The author of Mary Barton, Greg asserts, may be counted among “the hosts of humanity-mongers” who are determined to depict leaders of industry as “upstarts from the very dregs of society” (“Mary Barton”). (See Figures 8 and 9.)

IN 1829, NATHANIEL BAGSHAW WARD buried a sphinx moth chrysalis in some soil – he called it “mould” – in a closed glass bottle. While he waited to observe the insect's metamorphosis, his attention shifted to something quite unintended and unexpected: a tiny fern and a few blades of grass emerged in the mould and continued to grow without the addition of more water to the bottle. Thanks to this diminutive event, an unsuccessful gardener was empowered, and his frustrated desire was liberated into a genesis story of radical potential in the least forgiving of circumstances.

THE GIGANTIC WATER LILY WHOSE seeds were brought to England from the Amazon in 1847 had been sighted a decade earlier in British Guiana by Sir Robert Schomburgk and described in 1837. Named Victoria regia and now known as Victoria amazonica, the spectacular specimen had huge leaves five feet in diameter and seventeen feet in circumference, and flowers more than twelve inches in diameter. Germination of the seeds took some time, but in 1849 three plants developed, and the race was on to propagate the first flower. The triumphal first bud in England opened in early November 1849, its flower measuring three feet in circumference, at the Chatsworth estate of the Duke of Devonshire where the gardener and landscape architect, Joseph Paxton, had designed a greenhouse and water tanks for this purpose; Margaret Darby has detailed the precise attention that Paxton gave to the levels of light, moisture, and heat so as to approximate the plant's native habitat. The Victoria regia produced 126 large, beautiful, and fragrant white and pink tinted flowers. It was a popular wonder and received clamorous public attention for its size, beauty, and surprising strength. Paxton presented a leaf and flower to the Queen and Prince Albert at Windsor, and a well-known engraving in the Illustrated London News, November 17, 1849, showed Paxton's eight-year old daughter Annie standing on one of the leaves. Publication in 1851 of Victoria Regia; or Illustrations of the Royal Water-Lily with life-sized drawings and lithographs by Walter Hood Fitch and descriptions by the botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker brought further celebrity to the plant. Soon after, John and Horatio Mintorn, wax flower artists in London, were commissioned to make a model of the flower of this huge plant in different stages of development – “from the large and bristly bud to the white opening petals, and the full-blown flower, in its beautiful variegation of form and tint” (the Daily News July 17, 1850). Exhibition of the wax model generated wide press coverage about the “fac-simile…of one of the most curious botanical phenomenon of the present age” (Mintorn 1844, ii-iii).

WALTER HARTRIGHT, THE primary narrator of The Woman in White (1859–60), commences the novel with a declaration – “This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve” – followed by a complaint that relative poverty drove that “story” out of the courts because “the machinery of the Law” relies so heavily on “the lubricating influences of oil of gold” (5). Despite this beginning, the novel's concern with legal procedure is playfully opportunistic. Here Hartright grumbles about the Law's avaricious practice, but Collins will make a lawyer, Mr Wansborough, the key agent in Hartright's enrichment and social elevation. By contrast the novel is deeply engaged with its own historical moment as a time when creative endeavors of all kinds were being transformed by the laws of machinery. And thus it is the vehicle for Collins's metaphorical legal system – the creaking and covetous machine – that points to my present argument: that The Woman in White is English literature's first industrialized kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist which seeks to reconcile representation and reproduction by equating modern modes of illustration with the primal goals of biological creation.

MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES was a small Victorian museum that contained unique anthropomorphic tableaux made by the taxidermist Walter Potter (1835–1918). Its glass cases were crammed with small “stuffed” or “mounted” animals, such as birds, squirrels, rats, weasels, and rabbits, wearing miniature clothes and placed in models of the human settings of Potter's time. They play sports, get married, fill schoolrooms and clubs, but they also illustrate well known sayings, rhymes, and rural myths. From the 1860s the tableaux were displayed in Bramber, Sussex, in the southeast of England. In 1972 the Museum was sold and relocated to Brighton and two years later to Arundel, in Sussex. In 1985 it was sold again and moved to the Jamaica Inn – a Daphne du Maurier inspired tourist attraction on the edge of the bleak Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. The collection was finally dispersed in an auction sale in 2003. This sale attracted some media attention and several campaigns attempted to preserve the museum intact. The artist Damien Hirst claimed he had offered to buy the entire collection, but the auction went ahead (Hirst). Hirst was perhaps only the most high profile of those campaigning to keep Potter's collection together. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed hardly surprising that this unusual museum stood more chance of being rescued by an artist whose work often uses animal corpses to speak of mortality and the processes of preservation and decay, than it did of being bought by any public museum.

WITH WALTER CRANE, marginality is a question of medium. For his contemporaries, Crane's artistic practice embodied the ethos of Arts and Crafts eclecticism, apparent in this view of his studio from 1885 (Figure 15): watercolor, oil painting, tempera, sculpture, design, and illustration vie for our attention. As the painter Sir William Rothenstein recalled, “Crane could do anything he wanted, or anyone else wanted” (292). As an artist, designer, and – crucially – a socialist, Crane disregarded the traditional distinctions between high art and popular culture. With a history of art constructed along the fault lines of media, school, and style, Crane's diverse artistic practice and radical politics defy easy categorization. And this is precisely the point: his work requires the viewer to think across media, to move from the margins of wallpaper and illustration to the center of painting and back again. Or perhaps it is more fruitful to think of this process as one of inversion, placing wallpaper at the center and painting at its margins. According to Homi Bhabha, it is this “disjunctive temporality” (151) of the margins that allows cultural identity and political solidarities to emerge. The forging of political solidarities through art was the crux of Crane's project, and the disruption of established cultural hierarchies signaled the central role of art in political agitation. Visible on the right margin of photograph of Crane's studio (see Figure 15), the watercolor Pandora from 1885 (Figure 16) provides an ideal starting point for an exploration of the ways in which socialist politics move from the decorative margins to the very heart of Crane's art, a process enabled by the artist's politicized reinterpretation of classical mythology.

DESPITE THE WELL-ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONS between Dickens's novels and Victorian popular entertainment, and between Victorian show business and the display and dissemination of science, critics have not yet explored the possible links between scientific shows and Dickens's fiction. Work on Dickens and science has proliferated since George Levine's work in Darwin and the Novelists, but its central problem has been the fact that, as Francis O’Gorman described it, Dickens's scientific reading was “nugatory” (252). The most well-represented branch of science on his bookshelves was natural history; in even this, Dickens displayed only the “intelligent interest that would be expected of a man of the world” (Hill 203). Levine's influential “one culture” model surmounted the problem by pointing out the similar structural patterns implicit in the worlds described by Dickens and Darwin, but in an attempt to develop more direct links between Dickens's work and evolutionary science, almost all subsequent studies have focused on Dickens's 1860s novels, written after the publication of the Origin of Species (1859) (Morris 179–93; Fulweiler 50–74; Morgentaler 707–21). There has not been a study that explores Dickens's acquaintance with natural history at different points in his career, or through the visual and material cultures with which he was so familiar.

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE IN THE 1970s, my introduction to the 1890s was perfunctory. Squeezed into a couple of weeks in the middle of a year-long course on “Victorian and Modern Literature,” the literature of the decade was reduced to aestheticism and decadence and presented as something of a preliminary to the real business of modernism. Such a focus reflected the scholarship of the time, in which the fin de siècle was constructed as a moment of transition, one in which the political and socio-ethical dimensions so central to high Victorian literature were evacuated, as arguments for the autonomy of art came to dominate the literary cultural landscape. The organising principle was one of bifurcation: the separating out of avant garde from bourgeois culture, the high from the low and, of particular relevance to this essay, literature from politics.

Allen, Emily. A Shock to the System: Richard Feverel an the Actress in the House, 81

In the article by Kerry Heckenberg entitled “Thomas Mitchell and the Wellington Caves: The Relationship among Science, Religion, and Aesthetics in Early-Nineteenth-Century Australia” in Volume 33, Number 1 (2005), 203–18, the following phrase in the caption to Figure 20, p. 209, “from T. L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia. 2nd ed. London: T. & W. Boone, 1839,” should be deleted. The caption should read as follows: Figure 20. Thomas L. Mitchell, “Large Cavern at Wellington Valley, NSW.” Sepia sketch, c1830/1838. Courtesy of Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Gift of Victor Fox, 1979.