IN HIS BOOKMarxism and the City, Ira Katznelson, while lamenting the disappearance of spatial elements within Marxist thought, points to Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England as an ur-text that is able to provide “positive specification of the mechanisms linking base and superstructure” (56). As a corrective to the narrowly “scientific” strain of Marxism that privileged “structure” over “agency,” Katznelson views Engels’s early text on the industrial city of Manchester as the bearer of a double message: “Writing at the precise branching moment of the emergence of the modern industrial city, [Engels] connected the development of this new urban form to the epochal changes of the industrial revolution; he showed how changes in organization of city space affected social relationships within and between classes; and he tied this social geography to the suffering and coming to consciousness of the new proletariat” (144). In this critical exchange between “base” and “superstructure,” where Marxism becomes a tool for reading the city, and the city a space for revising Marxist method, class consciousness gets redefined as “urban consciousness,”1 thus supplanting the site of praxis from the arena of production to the psycho-social experience of space.

THE VICTORIANS LOVED MACHINERY. One example, to serve for many, is Mayhew’s description of reduced admission days at the Great Exhibition:

OF THE FIVE BIOGRAPHIES under scrutiny here, at least two have attempted to break with traditional biographical procedures. By traditional, I mean linear or chronological development, some elementary discussion of each work, an effort to detail all aspects of the life, the evasion of psychological elements that seem to defy explanation. Of the other three biographies, David Nokes’s Jane Austen: A Life purports to be more innovative than his study really is. He pursues Austen relentlessly as satirical and rebellious — picking up on her remark in one of her letters, “I am a wild beast.” But Nokes’s probe of her rebelliousness is not so new as he makes us believe it is, although he does edge Jane out of the “maiden aunt” posture. More on Nokes later, when he will be paired with Claire Tomalin’s very different Jane Austen: A Biography. Whatever else, both books indicate that Austen biography, despite the recent “definitive” study by Park Honan (1987), is still quite alive. Still, a corollary question remains whether we need two more Austen biographies when the material has already been so thoroughly defined.

Grandcourt threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, “Sit down.” She, already in the expectation of something unpleasant, had thrown off her burnous with nervous unconsciousness, and immediately obeyed . . . “Oblige me in future by not showing whims like a mad woman in a play.” (502; ch. 36; emphasis added)

NOVELISTIC HEROINES, like Gwendolen in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, become trapped in a complex network of social contradictions when they face the threat of marital violence in a world where such violence was thought not to exist — the middle and upper classes. Though increasing attention was paid to violence in the Victorian home as the century progressed, pamphlets, studies, and legislative inquiry significantly ommited sustained or systematic scrutiny of violence in the home that existed beyond the bounds of the working classes. Frances Power Cobbe’s important essay, “Wife Torture in England,” sought to raise public awareness about marital violence and to stimulate interest in protective legislation for the victims. Yet, in spite of Cobbe’s willingness to consider the possibility that some “gentlemen” might be guilty of abuse, she presents the phenomenon of wife abuse as safely distant from the comfortable quarters of the middle and upper classes, asserting that “the dangerous wife-beater belongs almost exclusively to the artisan and labouring classes” (55). In the debates surrounding the passage of the Divorce Act of 1857, Parliament repeatedly made apparent their belief that middle- and upper-class men could not be a danger to their wives by focusing exclusively on marital violence as a working-class issue. Only in “the humbler ranks of life [was] some prompt remedy” necessary; only “poor women” were conceived of as sufferers of violence at the hands of their husbands (Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., 145 [25 May 1857], col. 801–02).

GEORGE ELIOT’S MIDDLEMARCH concludes with the summing up of the lives of her most visionary characters, bringing them to either happy fulfillment or early demise according, not to the worth of their dreams but, in part, to their success or failure in choosing a domestic partner. For Dorothea Brooke, Middlemarch’s most luminous and large-souled citizen, Eliot can finally justify no other existence than that of a devoted wife and mother. Eliot defends this apparent demotion of her heroine from modern Saint Theresa to London matron by arguing that her “study of provincial life” was of necessity the story of domestic times, when, in fact, the “heroics” of raising a family and offering “wifely help” to a husband were more noble than sororal obligation or religious mysticism. Though the novel is set in the late Georgian period just before the first Reform Bill of 1832, it was published in 1871–72, at the height of the Victorian era and is thoroughly Victorian in character. For the Victorians, the “reformed rakes” of Richardson and Fielding are no longer desirable as heads of households. The Queen herself seemed to offer a model of perfect domesticity in her large family, middle-class values, and reliance on her husband. In fact, just as Eliot concedes the dominance of the “home epic” (890), the myth of the Victorian family continues to maintain a powerful presence within contemporary American culture. Questions that still consume us today — What makes a good mother?

THIS THOUGHTFUL, RAVISHING period film treats us to a work of serious historical scholarship and theoretical speculation on narrative and history, disguised as the old-fashioned plot about the difficulties leading up to a famous theatrical production. Taking as its focus the well-chosen moment in the creative conflict between Gilbert and Sullivan that was eventually resolved in their successful 1885 production of The Mikado, Topsy-Turvy seems throughout its stately first half to be leading us chronologically toward that resolution as if toward its own fulfillment. But meanwhile, in the film’s antic second half, a serious play sets in for the duration, and that traditional momentum is disrupted. By the time of the film’s complex closure — which is both bittersweet and deliberately, astutely, provocatively unsettling — resolution has broken down into multiple divisions once again: between the characteristically divergent responses of Gilbert and Sullivan to their mutual success; between men and women on and off the stage; between theatrical illusion and life behind the scenes. In the fragments from the film’s production of The Mikado — one, in particular, at the very end of the film — we rest for a while in the humor and beauty of its otherworldly charm, but with the uneasy sense of how tenuous, how arduously produced this beauty must be. This play-within-a-film is, among its many other virtues, the best present-day representation of a Gilbert and Sullivan production that I have ever seen.

The following abbreviations appear in this year’s bibliography:

BSNBrowning Society Notes

DAI Dissertation Abstracts International

N&QNotes and Queries

NCLNineteenth Century Literature

RESReview of English Studies

SBHCStudies in Browning and His Circle

VLCVictorian Literature and Culture

VPVictorian Poetry

VRVictorian Review

An asterisk* indicates that we have not seen the item. Cross references with citation numbers between 51 and 70 followed by a colon (e.g., C68:) refer to William S. Peterson’s Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography, 1951–1970 (New York: Browning Institute, 1974); higher numbers refer to Robert Browning: A Bibliography 1830–1950, compiled by L. N. Broughton, C. S. Northup, and Robert Pearsall (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1953).

IN THE NEAR DECADE SINCE Herbert Sussman published this journal’s last review essay on the study of masculinities (in VLC 20 from 1992), we in the U.S. have engaged in a heated national debate over “gays in the military,” have participated in a wonderfully perverse (to my mind) public discussion on whether or not oral sex is really “sex,” have seen a muscle-bound ex-wrestler elected governor of Minnesota and a cross-dressing “bisexual” basketball player make national sports headlines for his skills on the court and in front of the makeup mirror. Issues of masculinity — specifically, issues of self-control, proper and improper forms of male self-expression, and the importance (or lack thereof) of traditional adult male “role models” for youth — have been raised by or figured in all of these controversies. Frankly, I have loved the 1990s, have found it a time of enormously entertaining and productive social, cultural, and, yes, scholarly confusion and dynamism. At its best, the decade saw the tackling of some of the most profound issues imaginable regarding the intertwined nature of identity, performance, and politics. At its worst, of course, it simply saw the rehashing of dreary, formulaic answers to some of the toughest questions it dared to pose (a media-encouraged policy of “Oh, ask, please ask, . . . but first let’s promise not to tell each other anything that we don’t particularly want to hear”).