The linguistic atmosphere of Ireland has become definitely English enough, for the first time, to allow work to be done in English that is perfectly Irish in essence.—J. M. Synge

IN THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS (1848–50), William Thackeray calls upon the binary model of Victorian intellectualism in order to define the status and responsibilities of an author of fiction. For Thackeray, himself an initiate of the Middle Temple, the antagonist which permitted such a clarification of artistic privilege was the law, as conceived in utilitarian and mechanistic terms. Perhaps inspired by the ensign of the Inner Temple, the Winged Horse – suggestive of Thackeray's favorite trope for his own creativity, Pegasus-in-Harness – Thackeray effects a deft appropriation of the humanist history of the law for the services of literature, thus divorcing current legal praxis from its traditional role in the protection of liberties and the creation of English identity. Only the author can appreciate and animate the law's history, which is itself a tale of synergistic legal and literary productivity:

A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.—Matthew Arnold THE ONLY SURPRISING THING about the above concise narrative is its location, not in a broadside or newspaper, but in Matthew Arnold's “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865). Six years after the publication of George Eliot's Adam Bede, Matthew Arnold finds, or postulates, an “infanticidal woman” named “Wragg” and uses her as a symbol of all that is imperfect in Great Britain. He offers her in answer to the “retarding and vulgarising” (21) self-satisfaction he sees about him, the falsity, jingoism, and hyperbole of politics. But he is not using her as a symbol of the oppressed, ground under by those politics; rather, she represents the dreary reality that gives lie to the nationalist smugness of the Philistines, both of which necessitate the role of the critic. And the first thing upon which he focuses, rather than her actions, is her name: “Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names. Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!” (23–24). Her worst crime, it becomes apparent, is being plebian: of being, in fact, poor. Her next is a consequent lack of taste: “And ‘our unrivalled happiness;’–what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,–how dismal those who have seen them will remember;–the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child!” (24). Eliot's Hetty Sorrel has a much prettier name, and for most of the narrative her surroundings are bucolic. Eliot, however, is no more a Romantic than Arnold. She reacts against the stock sentimental image of the “infanticidal woman” as victim, and while at first glance Hetty Sorrel may seem a prototype, or rather, a culmination, of the outcast wanderer figure so common in both Romantic texts and popular literature, she is nevertheless part of the same field of representation as Arnold's wretched Wragg. Eliot's biographer Frederick Karl makes direct comparison between her elitism and that of Matthew Arnold (423); in fact, he draws a series of comparisons throughout the volume. A sense of beleaguered conservatism, a nostalgic nationalism, and anxiety about the laboring classes and working-class sexuality as a troubling marker of that worrisome group, all come together in the figures of both Wragg and Hetty. Eliot's text is not sentimental. It reinterprets the familiar wrenching tale of the abandoned woman, alone on her doomed journey, but with close attention to realistic psychological detail. Hetty is simultaneously the beautiful heroine of the folkloric ballad, the lonely outcast of Romantics such as Wordsworth, and the temptress and even murderess of the lurid “good nights” sold on the street, but she is transmogrified by the parameters of the realist novel and fixed, like a specimen ready for study, by Eliot's avowedly dispassionate eye.

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novel Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

IN THE PAST DECADE EDWIN CHADWICK has been the subject of several scholarly inquiries; indeed one can almost speak of a “Chadwick industry” these days. This is not, however, the first time he has attracted significant scholarly attention: in 1952, S. E. Finer's and R. A. Lewis's biographies initiated our century's first evaluation of him, culminating in M. W. Flinn's excellently edited reprint of Chadwick's most important text, The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (referred to as the Sanitary Report). Yet the Chadwick that emerges in recent accounts could not be more different from the mid-century Chadwick. The post-war critics saw him as a visionary, an often-embattled crusader for public health whose enemies were formidable but whose vision, extending the liberal and radical tradition, ultimately prevailed. Cultural critics, on the other hand, present a Chadwick who misrepresented (if not outright oppressed) the poor and who was instrumental in developing a massive bureaucracy to police their lives. Thus, while earlier accounts highlighted Chadwick's accomplishments, the progress of public health reforms, and the details of legislative politics, more recent ones draw attention to his representations of the poor, the erasures in his text, and the growing nineteenth-century institutionalization of the poor that the Sanitary Report promotes. Chadwick, in other words, is portrayed as either a pioneer of reform or an avatar of bureaucratic oppression.

It is not indeed necessary to own a country in order to do trade with it or invest capital in it.—J. A. Hobson, 1902 WHEN WE EXAMINE Alfred Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's poetic depictions of the wealth of the East, we find that most poems respond to one of two impulses. Some poems seem motivated mainly by the same classic orientalism that is exemplified by those poems of the Romantic period that represent the East as a world apart, untouched by time. But Arnold and Tennyson also wrote poems driven more by the imperialist currents that strengthened throughout the Victorian period; these poems show the East becoming increasingly assimilated into the very modern world of commerce within the British imperial system. In their poems on Eastern wealth, then, Arnold and Tennyson seem not only to be working through their inheritance from Romanticism (specifically, Romantic orientalism), but also to be negotiating between more traditional notions of value and those specific to the developing political and economic systems of the Victorian age. Ultimately, these poems' conception of the wealth of the East is at least consistent with, if not also implicated in, the conflicted evolution of imperialist ideology.

WHEN ANGELIQUE RICHARDSON AND I began collecting the essays included here, we were interested to see how recent theorists of boundaries like Audre Lorde (hyphenated identities), Gloria Anzaldua (borderlands), Donna Haraway (cyborg), J-F Lyotard (the in-between), or Jacques Derrida (deconstruction) fared in relation to classic theorists of boundaries like Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin. We found that while the field of Victorian Studies has absorbed the theory, current practitioners may refer little to past or present theoretical masters. Rather they describe which boundaries were salient to the Victorians and why; when they were permeable and how; and who enforced them and to what ends. The essays in this volume focus on specific boundaries and amass a wealth of detailed knowledge about them. They include the boundaries or boundlessness of London and her suburbs (Parrinder, Cunningham); transnational or deterritorialized boundaries of empire (Spear and Meduri); psychological boundaries (Rylance, Trotter); boundaries between body and soul (Moran) and living and dead (Robson); generic boundaries (Barzilai, Howsam, Small, Toker); boundaries of popular representation between art and politics (Ledger, Livesey); and boundaries between humans, animals, and machines (Joseph and Sussman). The essays here interrogate boundaries historically and pragmatically, with a high tolerance of the in-between or queer, to which I shall return below.

IN A BRILLIANTLY SUGGESTIVE ARTICLE, the urban historian Lewis Mumford defined the form of the “archetypal city” as follows: First of all, the city is the creation of a king…acting in the name of a god. The king's first act, the very key to his authority and potency, is the erection of a temple within a heavily walled sacred enclosure. And the construction of another wall to enclose the subservient community turns the whole area into a sacred place: a city. (12) This ancient city, which arose just before the beginning of recorded history, is double walled. It has an inner as well as an outer boundary. The outer walls enclose the area inhabited by a subservient population, but the city itself exists for the sake of the temple and its adjoining palace, the homes, respectively, of the god and the king. Some great historic city centers such as Rome with its Vatican, Moscow with its Kremlin, and Beijing with its Heavenly City preserve a structure that is apparently descended from this model. In Anglo-Saxon London, however, an abbey and a seat of government were established at Westminster, just outside what became the walled City overlooked by the grim citadel of the Tower. Canterbury, not London, became the nation's religious capital. London, in effect, marks a stage in the separation of spiritual and temporal powers and, thus, in the secularization of the city. Medieval London was able to assert its independence from the monarchy through the institution of its self-governing Corporation, presided over by the Lord Mayor. The mayoralty was the only significant temporal office in the land not in the gift of the king; and this explains why, in the folk-tale, the ragged boy Dick Whittington could become Lord Mayor of London.

Oh it really is a wery pretty garden And Chingford to the eastward could be seen; Wiv a ladder and some glasses You could see to 'Ackney marshes If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between. “WHAT A PLEASANT THING IT MUST BE…to have ancestors,” muses Alma in George Gissing's The Whirlpool. This reflection is prompted by response to her location, living as she does neither in country village nor metropolitan center but in suburbia. Recognition of this brings her bleakly down to earth: “Nobody's ancestors ever lived in a semi-detached villa” (342; pt. 3, ch. 4). Genealogically speaking, of course, Alma has as many ancestors as anyone else, as Gissing knew perfectly well; his point, however, is to signal through Alma–as he does throughout the novel–the degree to which the explosion in suburban living that characterized late nineteenth-century London had disturbed and fractured identities. Alma's ancestors may have existed, but not in any spatial, social, or temporal dimension to which she, a dweller in the new semi-detached suburbia, can relate. Like all suburban dwellers of the fin de siècle, she has moved beyond the bounds of the historically known and culturally defined. Floundering between fantasies of rural idylls and illusions of metropolitan glamour, she is fatally unable to settle the new territory she now actually inhabits, a terra incognita of domesticity in redbrick villas, of streets, gardens, commuters, of atomized family units in homogenized streetscapes. She has no social or historical chart by which to navigate.

The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.—Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror THE HISTORY WE ARE SKETCHING is one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging.

MY TITLE is derived from G. H. Lewes's psychological magnum opus Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79). Lewes's image is a metaphor for the relation of mind to brain, or more generally of the mind to the nervous system: “every mental phenomenon has its corresponding neural phenomenon (the two being as convex and concave surfaces of the same sphere, distinguishable yet identical)” (Problems: First Series 1: 112). His point is that, though the two entities can be analytically distinguished, they are as necessarily linked as the two surfaces of a bending plane. Like the recto and verso of a sheet of paper, or signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, one can make an interpretative separation of the two, but not an ontological one. It is a characteristically deft metaphor by Lewes to express a notoriously vexed relationship, not only in Victorian psychology but also in modern thinking today.