One of the most inveterate and gifted liars in Victorian fiction, Lizzie Eustace, the heroine of Anthony Trollope's 1873 novel The Eustace Diamonds, is also one of the most enigmatic. Driven both by her social ambition and by her desire to retain the Eustace family diamonds – a necklace given to her by her late husband but claimed by his relatives as an heirloom – Lizzie depends on deceit to achieve her ends throughout the novel. Yet, her reliance on mendacity becomes perplexingly excessive, confusing not only her sycophantic companion, Julia Macnulty, but most of the story's other characters as well.

In the century and more since Joseph Conrad first published “Falk: A Reminiscence,” his tale has been examined from a variety of critical perspectives. I would like to begin by reviewing some of these responses in order to locate this paper's perhaps surprising claim that “Falk” is a story about dining.

Cecil Rhodes, the “Colossus” of late Victorian empire, proudly proclaimed himself a barbarian. He spoke of his taste for things “big and simple, barbaric, if you like,” and boasted that he conducted himself “on the basis of a barbarian” (Millin 165, 242). His famous scholarships designed to turn out men fit for imperial mastery required success in “manly outdoor sports,” a criterion Rhodes privately called the proof of “brutality” (Stead 39). Yet while Rhodes celebrated qualities he called barbaric or brutal, his adversaries seized upon the same rhetoric to revile him. During the Boer War, for instance, the tactics by which Rhodes and his friends tightened their grip on South Africa were boldly condemned by Henry Campbell-Bannerman as “methods of barbarism.” Similarly, G. K. Chesterton denounced Rhodes as nothing more than a “Sultan” who conquered the “East” only to reinforce the backward “Oriental” values of fatalism and despotism (242–44). This strange consensus, in which Rhodes and his critics could agree about his barbarity, reflects a significant uncertainty about late Victorian imperial ambitions and their relationship to “barbarism.” Clearly, the term was available both to the empire's critics as a metaphor for unprincipled or indiscriminate violence and to imperialists as a justification for their efforts to bring civilization to the Earth's dark places, to spread the gospel, and to enforce the progress of history that the anthropologist E. B. Tylor called “the onward movement from barbarism” (29). But Rhodes's cheerful assertion of his own barbarity represents something altogether different: the apparent paradox of an imperialism that openly embraces the primitive. Nor was Rhodes alone in sounding this particularly troubling version of the barbaric yawp. During the period of the New Imperialism (1871–1914), Victorian popular culture became engrossed as never before in charting vectors of convergence between the British and those they regarded as primitive, and in imagining the ways in which barbarians might make the best imperialists of all. This transvaluation of savagery found its most striking expression in the emergence of a wildly popular genre of fiction: stories of lost worlds.

Drinking was a serious preoccupation for mid-century English Victorians, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel sodden with drink. This startlingly explicit novel is a troubled and troubling anatomy of upper-crust drunkenness, obsessed with issues of control and productivity, of appetites and class, as they play out across the body of its prime sot, the wealthy playboy Arthur Huntingdon. In telling her drinking tale, Brontë is doing more than simply crafting a prurient morality story, meant to scare drinkers straight. Arthur's fall into the bottle is emblematic of the increasingly untenable role of the landed gentleman in Victorian culture, and the dire consequences of his appetites suggest the possibility of a radical social revisioning across that gentleman's prone, overstuffed body.

Attitudes toward the consumption of alcohol by the British working class had begun to shift during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, as the environment and working conditions were gradually recognised as being a major contributory factor in drunkenness. Friedrich Engels had raised the environmental issue in 1845 in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, arguing that cramped, uncomfortable living conditions and harsh working practices drove the worker to drink. Engels states of the worker, “His enfeebled frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, loudly demands some external stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the public house, he has absolutely no other place where he can meet his friends. How can he be expected to resist the temptation?” (133). But the power of the temperance movement's focus on individual responsibility and self-help during the mid-nineteenth century meant Engels's focus was not widely accepted until the resurgence of socialism at the end of the century. By then resentment was rising within both the working class generally and the socialist movement against the imposition of abstinence, especially when the consumption of other classes remained steady. As Brian Harrison states, “it was now suspected that [the workers] were being hypocritically inculcated by self-interested capitalists,” (402) and British socialists were keen to promote this perspective.

The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved was first published in serial instalments (from 1 October to 17 December1892) with illustrations by Water Paget; see Figure 6) in the Illustrated London News and were published simultaneously with the same title in the American magazine Harper's Bazar. It then appeared in book form, with substantial revisions, as The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament in 1897, and was, in fact, the last of Hardy's novels to appear (Jude the Obscure being published in 1895).

The Turn of the Screw was published in five authorized forms during Henry James's life: as a serial in Collier's Weekly early in 1898, as one of two tales in a “duplex” edition published simultaneously in America and England in October 1898, as the second of four works in a volume of the New York Edition in 1908, and as the first volume of The Uniform Tales of Henry James, edited by Martin Secker in 1915. The first version, in addition to the frame narrative and twenty-four chapters, was divided into twelve installments and five “Parts.” The version published in the duplex edition under the title The Two Magics was altered to suppress these “Parts,” delete the ending of one chapter, raise Flora's age, and place “more focus. . . on the governess,” among other minor alterations (James, The Turn of the Screw 87). The New York Edition underwent even more substantial alterations.

It may seem that Christmas literature, with its glorified descriptions of overflowing tables and conviviality, has no place in a discussion of that other extreme, starvation. However, much of the nineteenth-century literature containing narratives of Christmas speaks directly to national fears of famine. Starvation entered the print matter of Christmas first as part of a social argument and later as a concern for the abiding national identity that had become intertwined with Christmas itself and, more symbolically, Christmas fare. Writers including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Farjeon, Augustus and Henry Mayhew, the creators of Punch, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon authored Christmas pieces that showcase literary reactions to the developing issues of hunger throughout their century. This essay offers an overview of the treatment of starvation in the Christmas literature of the nineteenth century.

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

“‘Modern Life’ – with a Vengeance”: William Powell Frith at the Guildhall Art Gallery

TIMOTHY BARRINGER

Birth of the Bestseller

HERBERT SUSSMAN

When Isabella Beeton wrote in her Preface to Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) that, in order to compete with the attractions of clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses that serve men so well, the mistress must be conversant with cookery and all other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home, she was making use of a narrative that would have been familiar to many of her readers. Both male and female writers of etiquette and cookery books aimed at the bourgeoisie attempted to persuade their readers of the necessity of household management by drawing on this narrative.

These words were penned by a professor of the Royal Medico-Botanical Society in the late 1830s to commemorate the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii). Yet although written near the beginning of the Victorian era, their sentiment – that tea was both an element of national self-definition and a stimulator of the individual prosperity and wellbeing on which that polity was based – nonetheless epitomizes the broader sweep of the nineteenth century's engagement with that article of consumption. How tea came to occupy this role, and why, is the subject of this essay, which focuses on the book-length tea history – a slightly peculiar genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, advertisement and travelogue, personal account and scientific treatise. These histories appeared throughout the nineteenth century and often were explicitly funded by various segments of the tea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equivalent of an infomercial). Because of their direct relationship to commercial and trading concerns, their role in recording and shaping the taste for the beverage, and their dissemination across a fairly broad public, tea histories offer an important, intertextual index of the Victorians' relationship to the beverage, as well as the way in which the relationship between home and Empire was constituted and changed over the course of the century.

Since our categories of thought produce what they claim to categorize, how are we conceptualizing Victorian Poetry today and what is the Victorian poetry we are producing? The two journal volumes and online essays under review, Victorian Poetry Spring 2004 (42.1) and Winter 2003 (41.4) and Literary Compass: Victorian online 2003–2004, feature discussions about the field's identity and new directions, while appraising where it has been. It is useful to see how recent books by Constance Hassett, Amy Billone, Ana Parejo Vadillo, Helen Groth, E. Warwick Slinn, and David Riede might be located in this larger moving picture.

Hetty Sorrel's economic self-interest is impossible to ignore, as is its sexual nature. George Eliot tells us that Hetty is “quite used to the thought that people liked to look at her” and is determined to exchange her physical charms for a life of luxuries (96; ch. 9). Hetty's attraction to the young, wealthy Arthur Donnithorne is unabashedly opportunistic. While Hetty is searching for Arthur, once she is aware of her “swift-advancing shame,” the narrator reveals the turn of her thoughts: “He would not marry her and make her a lady; and apart from that she could think of nothing he could give her towards which she looked with longing and ambition” (364; ch. 35, 372; ch. 36). And it is certainly not unusual for economic considerations to figure in the Victorian marriage plot; Mary Barton's attraction to Harry Carson is predicated on his ability to make her a lady; Rosamond Vincy marries Lydgate in the hopes that his relationship to the landed gentry will, quite literally, pay off. It is the lethal turn of Hetty's material self-interest – the murder of her illegitimate child – that makes her story exceptional. I suggest that Hetty's desire to “purchase” Arthur's social prestige and her ultimate rejection of maternal responsibility intersect with Malthusian economics. The central action of the story, infanticide, signifies one of the chief topics of Malthusian debate. T. R. Malthus and his followers suggested that economically imprudent marriages were akin to an unthinking infanticide because the newlyweds would likely be unable to feed the children that would arise from their conjugal relations; they also registered child-murder as one of the checks to population, classifying it as “one of the worst forms of vice and misery” (1803: 71; ch. 3). In this essay, I read food and the life-and-death economics of food in Adam Bede as a register for Malthusian concerns about sex, family, responsibility, and dependence. In the novel, these concerns are not only for fathers – which is Malthus's own emphasis – but also for mothers. Although published in 1859, the novel is set in 1799, a year after the first publication of Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and three decades before the Poor Law reform developed in response to Malthusian analysis. It is in this context that I propose reading Adam Bede alongside Malthus's Essay.

When called upon to host a banquet celebrating the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, the world's first display of international industry, the Mayor of York turned to the period's most renowned chef for the catering. The Frenchman Alexis Soyer, who had recently resigned from his position at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, had made a name for himself in Britain through a combination of extravagant culinary endeavours and popular household cookery books. The banquet at York was an important occasion; joining Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's Consort, was a long list of national luminaries from Victorian high society and the political world. Soyer did not disappoint the Mayor, or his guests. The Times commented that amongst the vast array of international cuisines on offer was featured “one dish, to which turtles, ortolans, and other rich denizens of land and sea had contributed, [which] cost not less than 100l.” The paper noted with satisfaction that the feast was consumed before an “emblematical device representing Britannia in her conventional attire receiving the industrial products of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America” (“The Banquet at York” 5). That this emblem provided the backdrop to such cosmopolitan fare was salient: it spoke to the way in which the production and consumption of food would become a crucial motif in the positive representation of globalisation as it was understood at the Exhibition; it also highlighted the important role that the Victorian metropolis would fulfil in the realisation of this new world order. Certainly, the internationalist bent of Soyer's cooking seemed entirely appropriate to the luminaries gathered at the York banquet, and it was no doubt with the French chef's culinary scope in their minds as well as their stomachs that the Exhibition's organisers invited Soyer to submit a tender to provide refreshments at the display itself (Soyer 197).

“London, for some time previous to the opening of the Great Exhibition, has been a curious sight even to Londoners,” Henry Mayhew declared in 1851, or the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to “Enjoy Themselves,” and to See the Great Exhibition, his comic instant novel about the transformation of London in the year of the Great Exhibition. Mayhew proceeded to detail what had grown curiouser and curiouser about the London scene in that climactic year: “New amusements were daily springing into existence, or old ones being revived. The Chinese Collection had returned to the Metropolis, with a family from Pekin, and a lady with feet two inches and a half long, as proof of the superior standing she had in society; Mr Calin [sic; he means Caitlin] had re−opened his Indian exhibit; Mr Wyle [sic; he means Wyld; instant novels apparently did not allow much time for proofreading] had bought up the interior of Leicester Square, with a view of cramming into it – ‘yeah, the great globe itself’” (132). Elsewhere in Mayhew's parodic panorama of London's exhibition mania, he offered a view of other globalized London scenes, focusing on celebrated chef Alexis Soyer's new restaurant, “where the universe might dine, from sixpence to a hundred guineas, of cartes ranging from pickled whelks to nightingale's tongues . . . from the ‘long sixes,’ au natural of the Russians, to the ‘stewed Missionary of the Marquesas,’ or the ‘cold roast Bishop’ of New Zealand” (2). Mayhew's imaginary menu, with its cannibalistic extremes, expresses a wider concern about the deluging of London by foreigners come to see the Great Exhibition (some 60000 “extra” foreigners – beyond, that is, standard visiting numbers – were estimated to have actually visited, mostly from the Continent, that year, roughly doubling the existing foreign population of London; see Auerbach 186), which found expression in an amused (when not more genuinely terrified) xenophobia that often focused on foreign foodways.

With the publication ofThe Tale of Mr. Tod (1912), Beatrix Potter articulated her impatience with “goody goody books about nice people” (Linder 210) and declared her intention “to make a story about two disagreeable people” (Potter, Tale of Mr. Tod 7). Yet although the subjects of the story, Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod, might be the most viciously disagreeable protagonists in Potter's children's stories, her readers were already acquainted with characters who challenged the boundaries of propriety, graciousness, and respectful deference to authority. Throughout her oeuvre, many such characters are not entirely punished for their trespasses, a pattern which often surprises modern readers who blithely assume that the daintily-illustrated books about woodland critters and barnyard creatures affirm conservative Edwardian conventions of behavior and standards of decorum.