Scholars have had a difficult time assessing the significance of Dinah Mulock Craik (1824–1887), best remembered as the author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). The critical verdict on her life and letters has swung toward extremes. Some critics have seen her, to quote Henry James, as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental” (172); her novels embody the Victorian values of self-help, moral earnestness, and hard work, and it is assumed that her life did too. Elaine Showalter's and Sally Mitchell's feminist recoveries of Craik's work in the 1970s and early 1980s found that just the opposite was true, and that Victorian sentimentality allowed Craik to voice the subversive desires of her female readers covertly, in a form that was acceptable to the general public (Showalter 5–7, Mitchell 31). This critical tradition tended to overemphasize the melodramatic aspects of Craik's life and career as a means of dramatizing the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The most recent scholarship eschews Craik's life altogether for the most part, focusing on her novelistic representations of disability, of Irish and Scottish nationality, and of class and enfranchisement. This criticism engages Craik's writing as an interesting cultural artifact rather than as an aesthetic object: her work is once again seen as embodying normative Victorian values, but to what extent the author was the cognizant promoter of these values, and to what extent she was their unwitting filter, and whether it matters, is unclear. But new archival work shows the importance of her life in understanding her career. The Mulock Family Papers, held at the University of California at Los Angeles, underscore Craik's challenges in managing an abusive father, who suffered from periods of dejection followed by periods of great happiness, and who was frequently absent and incarcerated. Craik was intensely private when it came to her personal life, and scholars like Showalter have read her reserve as a bow to womanly decorum in a life otherwise dominated by literary celebrity. But the archive suggests that Craik's taciturnity was instead a strategy for managing the threat of violence and scandal.

Despite a rich and varied critical heritage, reception of George Meredith's 1879 novel The Egoist has tended to rely on the author's Essay on Comedy as a key to unlocking the novel's many mysteries. Written just two years earlier as a lecture for the London Institution, the Essay would seem an apt place to start. A blueprint for Meredith's attempt to offer a revitalizing corrective for the tedium of everyday life, that “monstrous monotonousness” of convention and complacency that enfolds us (The Egoist 5; Prelude), the Essay helps explain, and thus rehabilitate, the novel's apparent oddities: its fragmentary and discontinuous narration, dynamic conception of character, and infamous, ostentatious stylistic eccentricities, to name but the most obvious anomalies. The parallels between the Essay and the novel are well rehearsed by critics; indeed, this connection has served both the novel and critics well, generating a range of forceful and illuminating readings. It must be said, too, that the critical tendency to see The Egoist as an outgrowth of the Essay represents a significant improvement over the main thrust of contemporary reviews of the novel, in which the four most frequently used words were “affectation,” “obscurity,” “artificiality,” and “weakness” (I. Williams 11; Lucas 3).

In his Preface to R. M. Ballantyne's most famous novel, J. M. Barrie writes that “[t]o be born is to be wrecked on an island,” and so the British boy “wonder[s] how other flotsam and jetsam have made the best of it in the same circumstances. He wants a guide: in short, The Coral Island” (v). While for Barrie the island is a convenient shorthand for masculine self-actualization, the question pursued here is the relevance of a coral island, or more specifically the coral that forms the island, to the child reader. Published in 1857 and widely recommended for boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century, The Coral Island presents three boys, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, who in the first half of the novel demonstrate their resourcefulness in forming an idyllic community. Their pre-lapsarian paradise is then disrupted, first by Pacific Island cannibals and then by European pirates, the juxtaposition implicitly presenting civility as a quality that must be actively maintained by the European reader, rather than assumed as inherent in ethnicity. The second half of the novel sees the boy narrator, and eventually all the boys, implicated in key Western activities in the South Pacific: piracy, trade, and missionary activity. The latter is important to Ballantyne, a staunch Christian himself, and is focused through the historical phenomenon of Pacific Island “teachers,” that is, converted Pacific Islanders who preceded or accompanied European missionaries in the effort to spread Christianity across the South Pacific. The missionary work highlighted in the novel, as this essay will show, is also integrally connected to the coral featured prominently in its title.

In “The Decay of Lying” (1889), Oscar Wilde's speaker calls Victorian novelist George Meredith “a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father” (Wilde 976). The comment underscores the idealism running through Meredith's strange and understudied novels. Wilde's speaker announces that Meredith “has made himself a romanticist” (976), a self-conscious reactionary against Victorian High Realism who is nonetheless situated deeply within it. Meredith's uneasy relationship with his own time has likely affected recent critical assessments of his work. Though his canonical status surpassed George Eliot's in the 1940s, and although there was a mini-explosion of Meredith scholarship in the 1970s, more recent work has focused on his sonnet sequence, Modern Love, and his psychological novel, The Egoist. However, with the rise of interest in the history of the book, gender and sexuality studies, and Victorian publishing, Meredith's novels are becoming the subject of renewed attention.

I begin this essay by quoting two books that deeply shaped George Eliot's thinking because I want to draw attention to the problem of “faith” in her writings, which I believe illuminates an important aspect of her realist project. I am not so much interested in her well-documented personal loss of faith, or her deconstruction of Victorian Christianity into religious humanism (Knoepflmacher 44–59; Wright 173–201; Dolin 165–89), as I am in her positive theorization of faith, throughout her early writings, as a cognitive structure that shapes perception, interpretation, and action. Faith materializes as beliefs shape perception, perceptions shape belief, in hermeneutical spirals coiling out to exert benign or malignant force on believers’ material lives. For Eliot, Christian faith enables social violence, and literature must both expose this malignant relationship and instill more benign (and less totalizing) cognitive patterns for bringing one's faith to bear on materiality. Among other effects, such a transformation changes the way the Bible itself can be read. The realism Eliot articulates in Adam Bede (1859) and elaborates for the rest of her career is modeled on her understanding of the cognitive structure of faith – and calculated to infiltrate and eradicate it.

Felix Carbury's name is a classically Trollopian bit of fun. The heir to the Carbury family estate is dubbed with the Latinate for “happy and fortunate” when Felix is in fact the active agent of its sorrow, loss of fortune, and impending demise. Though Felix's gambling, drinking, and indolence are the practices most dangerous to his family, Anthony Trollope frames his sexual habits as most dangerous to society and young readers. The narrator and other characters aptly call Felix “vicious” (21; ch.2, 132; ch. 17, 540; ch. 71), which is etymologically rooted in “vice.” Margaret Markwick's assertion that “viciousness” was Trollope's regular reference to “carnality or sexual licentiousness” (95) is helpful in understanding how Felix, and his fate, are being made to function in the discussion of male sexuality in which the novel engages. As a result of improper sexual liaisons, Felix descends from the status of eligible, aristocratic bachelor to contaminating social pariah. In the process, he ends up walking the streets in a parody of the desperation and police harassment that Victorian fallen women faced; loses his beauty in a symbolic disfigurement that mirrors the ravages of syphilis; and ends up banished not merely from his community but from the entire country. The plot explicitly states that Felix is exiled to prevent him from inflicting financial harm on women, but Felix's participation in the extratextual discourse on men's sexuality required that he also be expelled from the sexual economy to contain his potential for transmitting sexual contagion.

For many years, the novels of Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé, 1839–1908), were rejected as offering nothing but commercially valuable “voluptuous daydreams” (Leavis 164) that catered to “the degenerate taste of the new reading public of the commercial middle class” (Elwin 282). Since the late 1980s, however, they have been read with renewed interest. Ouida has come to be recognised as a “forgotten mother” of the 1890s aesthetic movement (Schaffer, Female Aesthetes and “Origins”); as a significant player on the anti–feminist side in the New Woman debates of the 1890s (Gilbert); and, with seeming paradox, as a writer keen to explore sexual transgression (Jordan “Writings” and “Enigma”; Schroeder “Feminine”). While there has been a recent monograph on Ouida's fiction (Schroeder and Holt), her journalism remains largely ignored. In 1882, Ouida began to write literary criticism together with analyses and commentaries on the politics of the state and the organisation of society for several journals, including the Gentleman's Magazine, the Fortnightly Review, the Westminster Review, the North American Review and the Italian Nuova Antologia. This article examines Ouida's late journalism, with some adversion to her late fiction, in an attempt to establish her core set of political values at this time.

Waterhouse Revisited

CAROLE G. SILVER

Young Victoria

GAIL TURLEY HOUSTON

Darwin in the Greater Britain of the Southern Hemisphere

E. WARWICK SLINN

Steampunk at Oxford

HERBERT SUSSMAN

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage

TALIA SCHAFFER

My aim in this essay is to provide a categorical map to the landscape of digital resources available to enrich scholarship on Victorian literature and culture. But I also want to reflect for a moment on the general state of digital scholarly work within the larger institutional structures of our disciplines. For over a decade now, digital resources relevant to the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture have been proliferating, becoming part of the way we live now as scholars and teachers. Yet reviews of such resources in standard channels have thus far been rare. There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs, all related primarily to the fact that digital projects have developed outside the well-settled infrastructure that has supported the academic book. This infrastructure is familiar to us, involving a network of institutions that includes publishers, libraries, scholarly societies, humanities departments, and academic journals like Victorian Literature and Culture. The scene of production of digital scholarship is, by contrast, variable and dynamic, involving experimental platforms, emergent collaborations, competing standards, rapidly-evolving technologies, and unfamiliar genres. Perhaps most crucially, digital scholarly resources in our field have only recently (with the advent of NINES [http://www.nines.org] in 2005) begun to receive systematic peer-review, of which post-publication reviews in academic journals have been a part. Because digital projects are more process than finished product (i.e., they are never “done” in the way a book is), they have tended to elude the reviewers. As a result of this unsettled environment, digital scholarship still abides in the shadows of the printed monographs, articles, and editions by which we have long measured achievement in the field.

In January 1886 Sir John Lubbock, a Liberal MP and scientist, addressed the members of the London Working Men's College on “Books and Reading,” and recommended a list of a “hundred good books.” The Pall Mall Gazette decided to publicise the list, as “the hundred best books,” a small but significant revision which has as its ultimate reference Matthew Arnold's idea that culture can make the “best that has been known and thought in the world current everywhere” (Arnold 113). Though Arnold himself declined to comment on Lubbock's list, the ensuing column on “The Best Hundred Books by the Best Judges” proved to be enduringly popular. It ran for four weeks, and the responses to Lubbock – which ranged greatly in tone, manner and content – were reprinted in a Pall Mall Gazette “Extra” which appeared on 10 March 1886 and sold more than forty thousand copies within the next three weeks. Obviously this debate took place in a context of growing anxiety amongst the intelligentsia about the seemingly endless proliferation of mass produced cheaper books, especially in the area of fiction. In the face of such abundance, it was generally felt that it was important for the “Best Judges” to instruct the newly literate classes on what to read. Indeed, as N. N. Feltes has shown in Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel, the response to Lubbock's original list may be read as index of late Victorian ideologies of literary value.

A few years ago, out of scholarly as well as pedagogical interest, I happened to be looking through two recent anthologies on the nebulous-sounding subject of “transatlantic literature.” I was teaching a new course on transatlanticism and was particularly curious to discover how these texts represented the period that is the focus of this journal and the one to which at least a few of its readers are attached. In both cases, I was struck by the degree to which “the Victorian” – the era, people, frame of mind, even the word itself – was either subsumed within Romanticism or absent. In Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature, 1767–1867, edited by Lance Newman, Joel Pace, and Chris Koenig-Woodyard, the subtitle alone incorporated half of the Victorian era, even while the contents omitted virtually all of the Victorians we would expect to represent that half. That anthology as well as the other, Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor's Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, included glossaries of salient terms for transatlantic inquiry, and while “Enlightenment,” “Peterloo,” “Romantics,” and “sublime” appeared there, “Victorian,” not to mention “Great Exhibition,” “natural selection,” and “utilitarianism,” did not.

Any attempt to edit EBB's works encounters immediate and overwhelming challenges. The manuscripts, together with letters, books, drawings, and works of art, were more or less blown to the four corners of the globe with the 1913 Sotheby's sale of her son “Pen” Browning's estate. As Philip Kelley and Betty A. Coley put it, this has been considered “a disaster” by scholars (ix). Kelley and Coley's magnificent reconstruction of the contents of Pen's estate, The Browning Collections, lists each item and whereabouts, if known (the reference aid is updated at The Brownings: A Research Guidehttp://www.browningguide.org/). It is a disheartening as well as essential reading for the researcher, for its catalogue includes academic and public libraries, private collection and associations, throughout North America and Europe. Although locating those Browning effects is now easier with The Browning Collections, should the scholar have funds for travel, the manuscripts themselves are in a perilous state. Not only are they often fragile (especially the important tiny notebooks) but also often extremely challenging to read because of the spidery, faint, and often illegible handwriting. Barrett Browning often revised her poems and had false starts, and sometimes one poem in manuscript is entwined into another. They are, as EBB herself declared, a “chaos of illegibility” (Works 1: xxxiv). The poetry manuscripts do not readily welcome the editor. In addition to the geographical and paleographical challenges, EBB's corpus was huge, including the ballad, verse novel, narrative, dramatic lyric, sonnet and sonnet sequence, translation, hymn, dream vision, lyrical drama, ode, tribute poem, and elegy. Finally, much of the information about her poetry comes from the ongoing Brownings’ Correspondence, which includes letters both sent and received, and is currently at volume 18 (up to March 1853) out of a projected 40. There is a wealth of material by the Brownings, and not all of it readily accessible. Editing the works of EBB is a daunting prospect.