THE LAST THREE DECADES of the nineteenth century were phobia's belle époque. During this first phase of investigation there was, it must have seemed, no species of terror, however febrile, which could not talk its way immediately into syndrome status. In 1896, in his Psychology of the Emotions, Théodule Ribot spoke of psychiatry's inundation by a “veritable deluge” of complaints ranging from the relatively commonplace and self-explanatory, such as claustrophobia, to the downright idiosyncratic, such as triakaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13 (213). Twenty years later, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was to respond with similar impatience to the list of phobias drawn up by the American psychologist Stanley Hall. Hall had managed to find 132 (446).

BETWEEN 1863 AND 1865 Gerard Manley Hopkins maintained a “little bk. for sins” as a record arising from his daily examination of conscience (6). Many of the failings seem sexually oriented: “Looking with terrible temptation at Maitland” and “Looking at temptations esp. at Geldart naked” (191, 174). The poet's guilty annotations of the illicit homoerotic pleasures of spectatorship are even more striking when the devout Hopkins associates perverse desire with the contemplation of bodies tortured for a religious cause: “Evil thought slightly in drawing made worse by drawing a crucified arm on same page,” or, even more directly blasphemous, “The evil thought in writing on our Lord's passion” (167, 157).

WHAT DO WE EXPECT to learn when we scrutinize the boundaries of, or within, Victorian literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Because many nineteenth-century scholars had always worked within an interdisciplinary paradigm, the theoretical shifts of the last thirty years or so, which broke down divisions between generically distinct discourses, could be said to have brought continuity, rather than change, to this particular community. Yet it is probably true that a pre-existing predilection for historicist investigation has gained added strength in Victorianist circles in recent times. Certain kinds of journeys have become especially common: intrepid explorers travel beyond the bounds of a literary text to hitherto unimagined contexts, and then return to said text laden with the spoils of their expeditions. The exotic voyage to discover the strangeness of the Victorians, then, has become a familiar event; we have witnessed an expansion of the empire of possible connections. Rarer than these heroic ventures, however, has been the practice of quiet contemplation: we have perhaps been less adept at standing still, and looking carefully at the ground we already hold, the ground we assume we share with our nineteenth-century predecessors. What happens when we eschew the temptation to strike out across new territory, and turn our eyes merely to the earth below? Might we discover boundaries between the Victorians and ourselves in the most mundane, the most fundamental of places?

“You mustn't marry more than one person at a time, may you, Peggotty?”“Certainly not,” says Peggotty, with the promptest decision.“But if you marry a person, and the person dies, why then you may marry another person, mayn't you, Peggotty?”“You MAY,” says Peggotty, “if you choose, my dear. That's a matter of opinion.”—David Copperfield (1849–50)

THE FIRST TIME I HEARD OF CAPTAIN MURDERER was in the Jerusalem Theater many years ago when the Welsh actor Emlyn Williams (1905–87) gave a reading of scenes from the works of Charles Dickens. Williams's performance was a recreation of the initiative of Dickens himself who, in the late 1850s, took on yet another activity and persona, that of the itinerant player, and began a series of public tours in which he read from his own works. Of all the pieces Williams performed on that occasion, the story of “a certain Captain Murderer” remains most vividly present to memory not only for its eerie atmosphere and plot but especially for its effect on the audience. I can still recall the collective gasp of horror, as well as the outbursts of laughter, that the story's denouement elicited from a captivated company of listeners.

SERIOUS PRACTITIONERS OF THE HISTORICAL discipline in late nineteenth-century Britain mistrusted their culture's practice of framing the nation's contemporary greatness in terms of former glories. In the view of the new professional historians, it was essential to negotiate a boundary between their own professional work and that of amateurs, with science on one side and literature on the other. The stakes were high. John Robert Seeley thought the writings of men of letters, particularly Macaulay and Carlyle, had “spoiled the public taste,” by being so delightful to read that “to the general public no distinction remains between history and fiction….deprived of any, even the most distant association with science, [history] takes up its place definitively as a department of belles lettres” (“History and Politics” 292). He and others wanted a new generation of students whose work would appear in serious publications which would no more appeal to the general public than Newton's Principia. A scientific training would prepare historians not only to research, write, and teach British history properly, but also to encounter the work of their peers as critical readers and knowledgeable reviewers. The boundary between popular and professional history (or between narrative and scientific approaches to the past) was often invoked by people like Seeley. A sharp dichotomy made for a compelling rhetoric of modernization and improvement. Earlier histories had been written inaccurately though patriotically, by gentlemen of letters for the general reader. Macaulay's essays, for example, had first appeared in the Edinburgh Review, and the great quarterlies continued to publish historical narratives that were unsatisfactory by modern standards. Equally unacceptable was the tradition of introducing children to their nation's past with such romanticized narratives as Little Arthur's History of England. Maria Callcott was the anonymous author of this much-reprinted and often-maligned work. Now, applying to the discipline the principles of Leopold von Ranke and a newly rigorous approach which resonated with the broader contemporary culture of science, history-writing was to be limited to trained professionals, so that it might be made precise, verifiable, and reliable, even at the expense of narrative appeal. One colleague paraphrased Seeley's views pungently: “To make sure of being judged by competent judges only, we ought to make history so dull and unattractive that the general public will not wish to meddle with it” (Freeman 326).

THEODOR ADORNO'S LATE LECTURES on Metaphysics propose a “shocking thesis”: “metaphysics began with Aristotle” (15). A “doubly shocking” thesis, Adorno tells his audience, because it gives credit where credit is not usually given, and declines to give it where most students of philosophy would understand that it belongs–with Plato (18). The Platonic doctrine of Ideas misses the essential criterion for metaphysics. Plato never fully accepted that the tension between the sphere of transcendence and the sphere of “direct experience” is not merely an adjunct of metaphysical inquiry but its defining subject matter (18). Aristotle understood this, and understood also that metaphysics has always a “twofold aim”; for, even as Aristotelian metaphysics criticizes Plato's attempt to define essence in opposition to the world of the senses, it tries to “extract an essential being from the sensible, empirical world, and thereby to save it.” True metaphysics, Adorno claims, is an effort to go beyond thought in the very act of defining the boundaries of thought. In his words, it is “the exertion of thought to save what at the same time it destroys” (20).

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.     In Memoriam 56, ll. 27–28

TWO CARNIVALESQUE EVENTS are referred to in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. One is used as an example in a discussion of political expediency: the Archbishop of Naples is said to have sanctioned, in what would now be called a populist gesture, the St. Januarius procession against the plague (1993, 384; bk. 4, ch. 33). The other is embedded in a simile: the attitude of the British mainstream society to Jews is compared with the attitude of the matrons of Delphi to the tired Maenads who had wandered into their city: the matrons “tenderly” minister to the Bacchae and take them “safely to their own borders” (195; bk. 2, ch. 17).

ON AN AUTUMN DAY IN 1842, William Hone lay dying. He was by now an obscure figure, but through the services of an old friend, George Cruikshank, he sent a request to Charles Dickens that he might shake his hand before he died. The famous novelist agreed to the request, and for a brief moment Dickens, Cruikshank, and William Hone came together in Hone's shabby London home. The meeting apparently meant little to Dickens who, subsequently attending Hone's funeral, recounted with comic viciousness Cruikshank's histrionics as his old friend was laid to rest. Writing to an American friend, Cornelius Felton, Dickens described how he found himself “almost sobbing with laughter at the funereal absurdities of George Cruikshank and others” (Ackroyd 407). The encounter between Dickens, Cruikshank, and Hone in 1842 is a little-known but with hindsight a significant convergence; for despite Dickens's seeming disregard for the ailing and rather threadbare old bookseller, the deathbed tableau crystallizes an important and much overlooked connection between Dickens's writings and an earlier popular radical tradition.

IN JUNE 1885 a group of radical intellectual Londoners gathered for the evening at that hub of nineteenth-century free thought, the South Place Institute. The event was organized by the Socialist League, a revolutionary socialist organization which counted William Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling as its most prominent members at that point in time. But this was no ordinary meeting. There were no lectures and no debates, just popular songs and dramatic recitations that had been carefully rehearsed by the membership in order to entertain for the cause. William Morris drafted a poem for the occasion, urging these “Socialists at Play” to cast their “care aside while song and verse/Touches our hearts.” Play, however, was not to lull the audience into a “luxurious mood”:

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs…. by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance. Man has become a kind of prosthetic god.—Freud, Civilization and its Discontents DOROTHY VAN GHENT'S “View from Todgers's” classic essay of 1950 (about perspective in Martin Chuzzlewit) might be defined as the starting point for what we now accept as the veriest Dickens commonplace: the fact that an interchange between animate human subject and inanimate object characterizes his world view. The boundaries of person and material thing are permeable, are constantly criss-crossing, according to Van Ghent, in a “system that is presumed to be a nervous one…. its predications about persons or objects tend to be statements of metabolic conversion of one into the other” (221). But this persistent reading, expressed here in biological terms–“nervous” system, “metabolic conversion”–of Dickens's stylistic habit, itself depends upon attributing to Dickens the critic's sharp distinction between the “human” and the “inhuman” or “non-human.”