Matthew Arnold cuts a familiar figure in narratives of Victorian secularization, although commentators often cast him in contradictory roles. In some accounts we meet him as an elegiac liberal who laments the loss of a no-longer-tenable faith but feels powerless to produce an alternative – “Wandering,” in a famous couplet, “between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” 85–86; see Miller 212–69). Meanwhile other studies portray Arnold as a cautionary example of aggressive counter-secularization, a humanist whose vaunted ideal of “Culture” becomes as absolutist as the religion it is designed to replace (Williams, Culture and Society 125–26). What both accounts share, however, is an understanding of secularization as the process whereby a definite thing called religion lost its hold upon European public life, leaving worried intellectuals to search for substitutes. Since the Second World War this view of secularization has come under increased scrutiny from sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and lately some literary critics; yet it remains difficult to imagine nineteenth-century literary history without it, largely because it is a narrative that was first developed by major Victorian writers like Arnold himself. Perhaps the best way, then, to engage Victorian crisis-of-faith writers is to follow the lead of recent commentators like Talal Asad and Michael Kaufmann and reframe the problem in discursive terms. Rather than retrace the rise and fall of two definite things called religion and secularity, Kaufmann argues, we should instead assume from the outset that “[t]here is no idea, person, experience, text, institution, or historical project that could be categorized as essentially . . . secular or religious” and mark how the significance of this opposition gets reordered in “varying discursive contexts” (Kaufmann 608; see Asad 25–26). We can see such thinking at work in recent scholarship that effectively replaces “secularization” with the conceptual emergence of religion as such – that is, the modern redescription of religion as a specific and limited sphere of human life, marked by certain energies (the irrational, the affective), whose role within the public is considered problematic. Anthropologist Timothy Fitzgerald, for instance, suggests that the Enlightenment turn toward regarding religion as the arena of strong personal belief was instrumental in establishing the space of the secular in the first place, insofar as it helped to define by contrast the new public sphere of “this-worldly . . . freedoms, laws, and markets” (Fitzgerald 5). Similarly, historian Callum Brown argues that late eighteenth-century Evangelicalism produced, as a sort of necessary pair, both the sociological idea of religion as an empirically discrete thing and our popular notion of religion as under threat or in decline (C. Brown 1–34).

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Arthur Conan Doyle, a prolific writer with a global reputation and readership, was settled with his family at Hindhead in Surrey. In his Memories and Adventures (M&A) he was to recall this period as an interlude of peace: “The country was lovely. My life was filled with alternate work and sport. As with me so with the nation” (151). This last sentence refers chiefly to the apparent placidity of the time, soon to be rudely spoilt by the outbreak of the South African war, which was to prove a critical and formative testing-ground for Great Britain and for Conan Doyle personally. But the sentence can also refer to the plenitude of a life divided between work and sport, and I will argue that Conan Doyle would be right to claim his experience here as representative of the national life. At the end of the century which invented modern sport, Conan Doyle's enthusiastic participation in sports, his writing about the subject, and his understanding of sporting culture have a great deal to tell us about Victorian Britain. As with him, so with the nation.

Some John, we are told, possibly both the Evangelist and the beloved apostle, but, for reasons we will see, possibly only one, the other, or neither, reanimated so his dying words can be recorded by other early Christians, tries to tell those who will now live with no contact with anyone who had contact with Jesus Christ, how they may live with that absence. Although his reanimaters preserve and venerate his words, it's not clear that they actually follow them or even understand them. In the wake of the questions first German Higher Criticism and then more recent work in the 1860s had raised with regard to the historical accuracy of the New Testament, Robert Browning, tries to propose how his contemporaries might believe. At the same time, as a consequence of a definition of how to believe, Browning also suggests how to look at the beliefs of others as expressions of one's condition and situation rather than as assertions whose accuracy it is in our interests to measure: he tells us what a dramatic monologue may show us. With regard to either aim, either with his contemporaries or with his critics, he did no better than John did with the poem's auditors. At least with regard to the issue of how to believe, one watches an odd critical history as readers have become increasingly aware of how completely Browning seems to have accepted the conclusions of the Higher Criticism about the historicity of the gospels, but have refused to accept how completely this meant that his justification for belief wound up reproducing the Higher Critical position about the historical reality of Christianity, with the addition of an epistemologically daring and dangerous justification of willed belief in an object accepted as possibly fictional that gives his ostensible Christianity only the appearance of an orthodoxy it had in fact abandoned.

The very idea of Victorian cosmopolitanism might at first glance seem an oxymoron. Historically bracketed by a Romanticism that took political inspiration from France and intellectual cues from Germany and by a modernism whose most prominent “English” personnel were largely from overseas, the Victorians can look decidedly parochial. The most incisive recent attempts to link cosmopolitan thinking to specific formal or stylistic innovations have tended to leave the Victorians out of the picture. A recent essay by David Simpson, for example, nominates what he terms the Romantic “historical-geographical epic” as a critically cosmopolitan genre – one whose barrage of footnotes ruptures the surface of the text and ensures that even in surveying the exotic Other, Romantic epics guarantee that “the pleasure of poetry sits uneasily but inescapably alongside the burden of critique” (150). On the modernist side, Rebecca Walkowitz's Cosmopolitan Style (2006) has compellingly excavated the links between a host of modernist experimental practices and the project of thinking creatively outside national boundaries – reaching the conclusion that “there is no critical cosmopolitanism without modernist practices” (18). Neither Simpson nor Walkowitz deals with the Victorians in depth, but a certain idea of nineteenth-century realism hovers as the implicit contrast to the genres and practices they catalogue.

In a 1927 lecture the Director of the British Museum Sir Frederic Kenyon countered the futurist leader F. T. Marinetti's calls for the destruction of museums by arguing that “in times of upheaval . . . salvation is to be found in adherence to tradition” rather than in “break[ing] loose from” it. Kenyon explained the museum's role in promoting this salvation:

In 1831 the first epidemic of what came to be known as “Asiatic cholera” bloomed in Britain. The disease, which in previous centuries had been known only in India, was to appear again in Britain in 1848–49, 1853–54, and 1866–67 as pandemics swept around the globe. But it was cholera's first arrival on the shores of Britain in 1831 that struck terror into British hearts. No one knew what disastrous consequences might ensue from this alien plague. Striking down perfectly healthy people, sometimes as they walked in the streets, it could kill within a few hours. So severe was the rapid dehydration caused by violent diarrhea and vomiting, and accompanied by hideously painful cramps, that victims rapidly became semi-comatose and turned blue-white. The Quarterly Review called it “one of the most terrible pestilences which have ever desolated the earth,” and claimed that it had killed fifty million in fourteen years (Morris 14).

It has recently been suggested, in various quarters, that cosmopolitanism, a concept that has proved broadly useful and popular in Victorian studies in the last several years, may have entered its critical senescence. The reports of its decline are, I believe, greatly exaggerated. I would like to prove the continuing vigor of the concept by using it in a reading of Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61). Conceiving of the cosmopolitan figure as a mediator between native English and colonial subjectivities, I will argue that Pip and Magwitch are reluctant cosmopolitans of indeterminate national identity. Although their final lack of a home country represents a psychological loss, the sympathy they learn to feel for each other – a fellow-feeling between gentleman and convict produced by a transnational irony enacted across class and cultural divides – represents a clear ethical gain, the attainment of a partial universalism that goes to the heart of the moral vision of the novel. Throughout this study, I will seek to extend that “rigorous genealogy of cosmopolitanism” that Amanda Anderson has urged (“Cosmopolitanism” 266).

Elisabeth Baumann was born in Warsaw in 1819 to a German mapmaker, Philip Adolph Baumann, and his German wife, Johanne Frederikke Reyer. Her early training took her to Berlin and, from 1838, to the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, a leading one in its day. According to Hans Christian Andersen, who would later write a biography of his friend Elisabeth, the famous German painter Peter von Cornelius much admired Baumann's paintings, and speaking of them he declared, “She is the only real man in the Düsseldorf school,” which was doubtlessly meant as a compliment (see Andersen, qtd. in Von Folsach 83). In Düsseldorf, Baumann was influenced by the prevailing realist trend of the Academy but added to it an idealistic and sensuous quality that would become her distinctive mark. After the completion of her training in 1845, Baumann went to Rome where she met the Danish sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau, one of the outstanding talents of his time, whom she married a year later. The couple settled in Denmark in 1849 (although Jerichau-Baumann kept a studio in Rome) as Jens Adolf became a professor at, and later President of, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1895, the Critic published an anecdote about two young ladies discussing the popularity of George Du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894):

I departed hospitable Athens on the first of February, the city of Pallas Athena glowing in the evening sun. My Greek Palace-servant Spiro had taken me to Piraeus in a Vienna-cart, where my numerous belongings were stored. It was the last minute to still be able to reach the ship, and steam could already be seen as we came closer to Piraeus. I am not the most punctual person, but when it is really necessary I can be on time. This time, however, it was a close call. Instead of being able to pack my own things, like other people of my standing, with my own hands or with my servants’, two of the most loveable and highly regarded people appeared on my threshold. The lady wore Turkish spectacles in front of her lovely eyes, the gentleman smiled warmly. And who were the lady and the gentleman? No less than His Royal Highness King George of Greece and his majesty's lovely Queen! “Mrs. Jerichau, you will not be ready, can we help? Here is a hairbrush and there is a silk ribbon you are forgetting, and your sketch book.” All this was put into the luggage, along with many pleasurable things “for the children.” These small things were later unpacked in Copenhagen with much enjoyment and laughter. At the same time, the carpenter was waiting who still had to box up my recently finished paintings. Truly, he had to wait, and Mrs. Jerichau tip-toed from the innermost rooms to the entrance hall, away from the swelling suitcases, which seemed to be filled up more and more as if by fairies, while the owner ran away from them towards the carpenter outside, and again away from the carpenter – a Greek who only poorly understood her, and who had even poorer understanding of how to pack pictures. Because he had not brought with him enough of the boards made in the King's palace, he had to make do with thin wooden bars such as one uses when sending chickens to the market. Out between the bars, the beautiful “Girl from Hymettus” and her companion, the “Shepherd on the Acropolis,” peeked. Finally, everything was ready, Mrs. Jerichau made as deep a curtsey as she was capable of, and thanked [her guests and helpers] from the bottom of her heart, but secretly did not believe that she would manage to reach the boat in time.

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), the English-language Indian poetess and politician, appears before the viewer in the frontispieces to her first two collections of poetry, The Golden Threshold (1905) and The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death and the Spring (1912). She presents herself in print, as in her oratory, as both a figure of nineteenth-century verse culture and a cosmopolitan nationalist. The Golden Threshold includes a now well-known introduction by Arthur Symons and a sketch of a young Naidu by J. B. Yeats (father of W. B. Yeats). [See Figure 1.] Arrayed in a voluminous and ruffled white dress, distinctly “Western” in style, with hands clasped together, Naidu's youthful yet grave face stares directly at the viewer. She appears here as a precocious, prepubescent Victorian poetess captured within a private setting. Yet when this volume was published in 1905, the picture, drawn during Naidu's sojourn in England in the mid-1890s when much of the poetry included in the collection was composed, must have been almost a decade old. The only sign of racial difference in the sketch is her lightly shaded skin and dark hair. The blurred sketch echoes Naidu's own ambiguous position at this time: she is neither wholly Indian nor wholly English, and she navigates uneasily between the roles of naïve student of poetry and accomplished poetess.

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

It Was the Worst of Times: A Visit to Dickens World

MARTY GOULD AND REBECCA MITCHELL

Turner in America

JASON ROSENFELD

Holman Hunt at Toronto

HERBERT SUSSMAN

The Afterlives of Aestheticism and Decadence in the Twenty-First Century

MARGARET D. STETZ

Darwin at Yale

MARGARET HOMANS

In a recent discussion of “Victorian Internationalisms,” the term cosmopolitanism is often used to designate the domain of individual feeling or ethics of toleration in contrast to the more geopolitical terminology of “inter-” or “trans-nationalism” (Goodlad and Wright 5–16). For Goodlad and Wright, the tendency of cosmopolitanism to evoke individual ethos rather than cultural, social, or political process suggests the merits of exploring complementary terms (15). They then go on to discuss authors with “more complicated subject positions than ‘European or American first’” serving other ends than conventional European hegemony (Goodlad and Wright).