In February 1893 the feminist journal Shafts published two articles by Mrs. A. Phillips the second of which provided an esoteric reading of the crucifixion in which Phillips, making recourse to Sanskrit, argued that Christ's death on the cross symbolized the “perfect marriage union of the male and female” (qtd. in Dixon, Divine Feminine 163). Feminist theosophists such as Phillips believed Christianity's neglect of the Divine Feminine to have resulted in a masculinist ordering of religious authority and in the concomitant subordination of women. The editor of Shafts, Margaret Shurmer Sibthorpe, agreed; she added a note to Phillips's second article urging her readers to work towards the formulation of a gospel that would facilitate women's emancipation. In the same issue of Shafts, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins was reviewed. The reviewer cited at length a passage from the novel's Proem characterizing the divine as the union of the male and female principles and concluded with a discussion of the “heavenly twins” of the novel's title. The Shafts reviewer, however, did not explore the significance of religious allusions in The Heavenly Twins, nor did she examine the relation between the dual-sexed divine of the Proem and the story of the heavenly twins, Angelica and Diavolo Hamilton-Wells. Subsequent Grand scholars have not, for the most part, taken up these questions. The possibility that the novel might constitute an attempt to reconfigure dominant discourses of religion and gender, of the kind Sibthorpe had called for and Phillips undertaken, is largely unconsidered. The New Woman as a “modern maiden” is instead assumed to emerge from a predominantly secular cultural context.

In 1868, Alexander Wallace paused in his introduction to the life and works of Janet Hamilton, a respected Scottish working-class poet, to note his subject's interest in literary parlour games: “Janet asked us if we had ever tried the writing of Cento verses, which she characterized as a pleasant literary amusement for a meeting of young friends in a winter's night.”

About two-thirds of the way through George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894), a novel that entranced the reading public with its descriptions of Bohemian Paris and mesmerism, there is a seventeen-page digression on The Origin of Species. This rumination is sparked by the fact that Little Billee is “reading Mr. Darwin's immortal book for the third time” while he contemplates proposing to the parson's daughter, Alice (180; pt. 5). Ultimately, he cannot bring himself to do so because Alice believes, among other Bible stories, that “[t]he world was made in six days. It is just six thousand years old,” a view debunked in The Origin by Darwin's depiction of the gradual evolution of species over vast periods of time (174; pt. 5). While the controversy elicited in the second half of the nineteenth century by Darwin's theory of natural selection continues today, the question remains: what is this debate doing in a novel about expatriate artists and the woman they love? I read this seeming digression from the sentimental and sensational plot of the novel as a cue to the importance of Darwinian ideas to reading Trilby. In this article, I trace Du Maurier's engagement in Trilby and in his cartoons with various permutations of Social Darwinism, notably degeneration (especially its relationship to class), society's moral and cultural evolution, and eugenics. I argue that the novelist negotiates between Darwin and his interpreters as he resists collectivism, or state intervention in questions of social welfare, in favor of individual liberty in matters of sexual selection.

In the work of George Eliot, a “past evil that has blighted or crushed another” is often “made a source of unforeseen good to ourselves” (Adam Bede 573; ch. 54). Eliot's early novel Adam Bede might be read as a three-volume exploration of the moral difficulties inherent in a narrative pattern premised on such inequality of lots. The seduction of Adam Bede's first love, Hetty Sorrel, her pregnancy, subsequent act of infanticide, transportation, and early death darkly prepare the path to the hero's joyous union with Dinah Morris, who guides him through the story's most painful, educative hours. Adam's union with Dinah, the narrator tells us, is deeper, more powerful, and more pleasurable than any with Hetty might have been because of the knowledge through suffering that Adam attains; “what better harvest from that painful seed-time” can there be than this second love? (578; ch. 55). Yet Hetty embodies all the loss and destruction that enable Adam and Dinah's redemptive future while enjoying no such redemption herself.

Charles Dickens was lionized in the early 1850s for his political powers as a novelist, journalist, and reformer. A December 1850 review of David Copperfield in Fraser's Magazine affirmed that the so-called “Boz”

The Aesthetic or “Patience” teapot is renowned as the ultimate parody of Aesthetic sensibilities. Composed of the head and torso of a male and female back-to-back dressed in the “greenery-yallery of the Grosvenor Gallery,” with puce hats and fashionable Pre-Raphaelite red hair, the teapot was designed by James Hadley (1838–1903) for the Royal Worcester manufactory following the success of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's operetta Patience in 1881. Bearing on its base the inscription, “Fearful consequences through the laws of Natural Selection and Evolution of living up to one's teapot,” the vessel took a swipe at Darwin's theories of evolution, as well as Oscar Wilde's famous aphorism. This teapot is certainly not “fit for its purpose,” defying “form must follow function”; rather it is a whim of fashion, novel but transitory. Recognized as a “limited edition” and expensive, its function being primarily for show rather than use, it marks the appearance of the modern “collectable,” in effect a souvenir of Aestheticism and now seen to commemorate its apogee. Yet although loaded with aesthetic signifiers – sunflowers, lilies and gender-bending – no scholar has attempted to unwrap the teapot's meaning, in terms of the identification of china and tea with “life-style aestheticism” (Figure 15).

Upon returning to England in December 1856 after sixteen years in the interior of southern Africa, David Livingstone, the celebrated missionary and explorer, received an enthusiastic welcome. Already a household name because of his well-publicized discoveries and travels, Livingstone now found himself a hero of national stature. The Royal Geographical Society and the London Missionary Society organized large receptions in his honor; he received the freedoms of several cities, including London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow; Oxford University awarded him an honorary D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law); and Queen Victoria invited him to a private audience (Schapera ix-x). Likewise, the encyclopedic narrative of his adventures, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), garnered numerous favorable reviews, sold some 70,000 copies, and ultimately made the explorer a rich man. Livingstone's narrative, wrote one early reviewer, opened up “a mystic and inscrutable continent,” while the story of Livingstone's famous four-year transcontinental journey – the first such documented journey in history – inspired admiration for being “performed without the help of civilized associate, trusting only to the resources of his own gallant heart and to the protection of the missionary's God” (“Dr. Livingstone's African Researches” 107). In promoting the Zambesi River as a natural highway into the interior of Africa and in advocating for the three C's – Christianity, commerce, and civilization – as a means to ending the slave-trade and opening the continent's natural riches to the outside world, Missionary Travels also struck a resounding chord with the public. Reviewers welcomed Livingstone's pronouncements, while describing the missionary as “an instrument, divinely appointed by Providence for the amelioration of the human race and the furtherance of God's glory” (“Livingstone's Missionary Travels” 74).

Why was Charles Dickens so popular when he broke onto the scene in the late 1830s? That's still a real question to ask, but so is another, related question: what did the terms “popular” and “popularity” mean when applied to this novelist at this signal moment in the development of the novel? Writing in the National Magazine and Monthly Critic: A Journal of Philosophy, Science, Literature, Music, and the Drama – a short-lived monthly designed to publish serious work on various subjects – G. H. Lewes begins his 1837 review of Dickens's Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist with a paragraph that worries over the nature of popularity:

At first sight these two eminent Victorians appear to be most incongruous travelling companions: the one a relatively austere young professor of Hebrew in the Free Church of Scotland, the other a mature, hard-swearing, short-tempered, thoroughly agnostic trouble-maker with an unconcealed penchant for oriental erotica. Both men, however, had provoked widespread controversy and were regarded in high places as “unsound.”

When Dr. Watson first meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the former is an itinerant medical veteran of the Second Afghan War who, sick and rootless, without “kith or kin” in England, is naturally drawn to London, “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the empire are irreversibly drained” (6; ch. 1). Lacking emotional ties, physical strength, and purpose of any real kind, Watson seems to demonstrate the “feverish restlessness” and “blunted discouragement” that Max Nordau described as degenerative symptoms of the age. Watson's identification with urban refuse of the empire, together with his metaphor of the metropolitan landscape as cultural sewer, suggests Nordau's degenerative “feeling[s] of immanent perdition and extinction” (2) and emphasizes both the pervasiveness of modern social decay and the destructive potential of insalubrious influences that lurk within the civilized world as much as they do on its remote peripheries.

Victorians Live examines the afterlife of the Victorians, the ways that Victorian literature and culture remain alive, continue to live in our own day.

Twenty-First Century Millais

ELIZABETH PRETTEJOHN

The Labor of Photography

GEOFFREY BATCHEN

Art & Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds

HERBERT SUSSMAN

Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on Stage and Screen

SHARON ARONOFSKY WELTMAN

Although the OED's first citation for “journalism” is dated 1833 (it comes from Westminster Review), the current dramatic expansion of digital resources suggests that scholarly use of Victorian journals may be reaching a point of transition. In addition, the number, variety, breadth, and depth of recent studies, most of them finished before the new materials went online, is truly remarkable.

In Naomi Lloyd's “The Universal Divine Principle, the Spiritual Androgyne, and the New Age in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins” (37.1; 2009), the first sentence of the final paragraph on p. 189 should begin: “As Heilmann has illustrated in her discussion of Grand's water erotic in New Woman Strategies (51–52, 95–96, 100).”

Over the last thirty years or so, sensation fiction has shaken off its scandalous roots to become a respectable area of academic study. The transformation began with the publication of Winifred Hughes's The Maniac in the Cellar (1980) and Patrick Brantlinger's “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” (1982), and gathered pace in the 1980s and 90s through the contributions of Ann Cvetkovich, Pamela Gilbert, D. A. Miller, Lyn Pykett, and Jenny Bourne Taylor. One of the results of all this scholarly interest is that the genre has begun to attract more introductory works that concentrate on consolidating what others have said. Ideas that were once considered new or controversial are now seen as common knowledge: we know that sensation fiction involves more than the influential novels written in the 1860s by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins; we are familiar with the frequent blurring between sensation fiction and other genres (including crime fiction and the gothic); we are well schooled in interdisciplinary approaches that read sensation fiction alongside science, psychology, and law; and we are used to competing claims for sensation fiction as a subversive or conservative genre. With so much attention being given to a collection of writings once described by Hughes as “irretrievably minor” (167) and by Brantlinger as “a minor subgenre of British fiction” (1), one could be forgiven for thinking that there are few secrets left to be uncovered. Yet, as the wide array of books considered here attests, the critical appeal of sensation fiction and Victorian crime shows no sign of abating. If anything, the first few years of the twenty-first century have seen even greater levels of interest: a number of Victorian Studies conferences have chosen sensation as their theme, and the genre features regularly in the pages of academic journals. Given that the extent of our ongoing fascination would probably have shocked a previous generation of scholars, this review of recent critical trends will try and figure out why the genre possesses such a powerful hold on our thinking and whether or not this hold is likely to continue.