This article uses a corpus of manuscript diaries to illuminate the practices and meanings of everyday mobility that shaped the lives of nineteenth-century Englishwomen. The female pedestrian has typically been characterized by scholars as a marginal or transgressive figure whose movements are interpreted through comparison to a masculine peripatetic tradition. “A Voyage of Discovery” seeks to broaden our understanding of what it meant to move through the world as a woman in the nineteenth century. Drawing from the narrated experiences of a broad range of little-known diarists, this article outlines a paradigm of “everyday adventure” to describe walking's status as an unremarkable act that nevertheless creates the potential for event and variety. In so doing, it expands on feminist concepts of the everyday, elaborates on the under-theorized relationship between walking and the body, and reassesses the boundaries of socially acceptable mobility.

This article analyzes Victorian abolitionism after the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, attending to particular epistemological racisms built into our ways of thinking about Victorian texts. Recent scholarship has begun to examine race in Victorian studies, but we've largely eschewed contemporaneous considerations of slavery and its ongoing imbrication with the British Empire. Notably absent are studies of abolitionism from within the U.S. South, where British commentators sought to contain slavery as a local depravity. I analyze narratives around the “Weeping Time,” the largest slave auction in U.S. history, including English actress Fanny Kemble's 1863 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, transatlantic periodical coverage of the auction, and nontraditional histories of local resistance. These texts disrupt the entrenched critical tradition of dividing the U.S. South from Britain, pushing us to reevaluate what we assume about race in Victorian studies today. Race, I argue, shapes Victorian and Victorianist subject positions through the location of bodies and ideologies in specific places. These localizations function as narrative shorthand to evaluate, for example, morality and aesthetics while silently assuming a default white subject position.

This paper identifies the theme of honey gathering in Charlotte Brontë's fiction and places it within the context of Romantic and early Victorian representations of the nectarium's role in insect-flower relationships. Brontë's novels often invert the conventional use of botany to represent female sexuality by representing men as flowers and endowing her protagonists with an ulterior form of entomological agency. These insects work to express Brontë's desire for greater economic and erotic mobility, but it is argued that this mobility is problematized by the self-absorbed nature of the masculine nectarium, a dulcet gland in flowers originally believed by botanists to ooze sugar to serve a plant's own needs. This is particularly evident in Brontë's industrial romance Shirley (1849), as the theme of honey gathering is pathologized to visualize a crisis in the plotting of Victorian femininity. This paper may be helpful to scholars interested in Brontë's fiction, representations of sexuality, botany, entomology, ecology, and early Victorian pest discourse.

In this paper, I argue that George Eliot's “Brother Jacob” (1864) reveals a fluid system of racial production that is inextricably tied to sugar. “Brother Jacob” is one of Eliot's most unusual narratives. It is written in the tone of a fable, and it concerns confectioner David Faux, who immigrates to the colony of Jamaica. Twice, Faux's plans for fiscal gain are thwarted by his “idiot” brother, Jacob, and the latter's uncontrollable sweet tooth in ways that warn against the ungovernability of bodies—especially white ones—that desire sugar.

My analysis employs the methodologies of critical race studies, as I examine how Eliot's text denaturalizes the frequent “invisibility of whiteness” (Richard Dyer). And if, as Sara Ahmed argues, we “do not face whiteness; it ‘trails behind’ bodies, as what is assumed to be given,” then Eliot's text reveals whiteness when it is in front of bodies, when its construction is rendered seeable. I analyze Eliot's examination of individual and collective white bodies that are ambivalently racialized through their desires for sugar. Throughout, I argue that the plasticity of racial forms connected to sugar suggests that bodies are unruly and cannot uphold coherent systems of racial meaning.

Although there has been extensive scholarship on Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone—including recent commentary on disability and queerness—there has been no extended engagement with the character of Limping Lucy, a Marxist misandrist working-class disabled lesbian. This piece serves as a corrective to that gap and a justification of why we should study her. Lucy appears in only six pages of the novel, but this essay embraces the minimal amount of text and performs a microreading. In doing so, we can learn a great deal about Lucy, her abnormal body, her radical politics, her role in the narrative, and the queer criptopia she imagines for herself and her disabled beloved, Rosanna. This reading will also demonstrate a mode of reading and ethical reading praxis I call narrative sidestepping—which explores and embraces expansive plot potentials for disabled characters. Using these theoretical tools, I will argue that Lucy, uninterested in the closure of the normative narrative (the solving of the mystery and the resolution of the marriage plot), intentionally delays it, focusing instead on her sidestepped narrative, her plan for a queer criptopic future with Rosanna.

The panorama was from its outset a medium of contemporary history. This article examines its contribution to initial historical narratives about the “Indian Mutiny” (1857–58). Nineteenth-century critics often saw the form as voyeuristic, while modern scholars have critiqued its chauvinistic patriotism. The article uses panorama paratexts, adverts, and reviews to recover the visitor experience and to compare these with contemporary would-be historical accounts of the mutiny. I ask, Was it possible for panoramic representations of the mutiny to avoid jingoism? And what can this case study tell us about mid-nineteenth-century approaches to historical distance?

My analysis of 1850s panoramas of the mutiny (by Burford, Hamilton, Marshall, and Gompertz) shows that when they depicted graphic violence, it did not suppress visitor numbers but did lead to accusations of voyeurism. Reviewers declared that the events were too temporally and emotionally proximate to be treated as history. Initial contemporary histories nonetheless borrowed from panoramic modes in their illustrations of the mutiny, making panoramas a means of mediating events into historical form. By the 1870s, concerns about voyeurism diminished but chauvinistic representation continued, as the episode ossified into a cultural myth. Chronological distance did not lead to greater openness but to more unquestioning jingoism.

This article uses thing theory to interrogate literary portrayals of ancient statues in Africa. It argues that Victorian colonists adopted a “rhetoric of thinghood” to portray these statues’ history and purpose as forever lost to time. By treating them as “things”—singular, incomprehensible, sublime—the statues could be decoupled from the indigenous cultures that made them. Victorians could thus avoid acknowledging the evidence that the objects’ appearance and manufacture provided of the existence of Black civilization, which Victorian race theory denied to Black Africans. Starting with an overview of the nineteenth-century European concept of fetishism, this article traces the development of that rhetorical sleight-of-hand through the real-world integration of the bust of Younger Memnon (now Ramses II) and other Egyptian antiquities into Eurocentric notions of world history: an integration that spurred a variety of interpretive methods intended to negate their racialized appearance. Nonetheless, many African artifacts, particularly those with human likenesses, remained sites of hegemonic destabilization, which authors like Haggard and Wells interrogated in their imperial romances. Under the assumed scrutiny of ancient statues—portrayed as pseudo-animate sentinels bearing silent witness to the unfolding of history—the justifications for colonial expansion corrode, triggering a more hostile and xenophobic mind-set in the Victorian protagonist.

Nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian and British narratives represent the Indian Revolt of 1857 as an event with a rich gustatory grammar—a problem of greased cartridges, adulterated flour and salt, and mysterious chapatis. Contemporary colonial sources report the circulation of chapatis across North Indian villages on the eve of the revolt. To this day, these chapatis remain inscrutable. This essay traces the chapati from the Anglo-Indian table to the Kanpur trenches in the first English-language novel of the revolt, Edward Money's The Wife and the Ward (1859). The chapati, as a domestic edible, functions as an index of assimilation. It adulterates its Anglo-Indian eater bodily and morally. It weaves together adulteration and adultery, to demonstrate the gendered colonial politics of bodily purity. As a food of revolt, the chapati is portrayed as a text of Indian fears of bodily contamination. I argue that The Wife and the Ward displaces Anglo-Indian fears of bodily adulteration onto Indian rebels. I examine how the novel reworks Anglo-Indian panic to analyze its schizophrenic nature—consuming chapatis in India while upholding British racial politics of purity and contamination. This bifurcation is conjured in the very term “Anglo-Indian”: always imbricated in the simultaneous and contradictory impulses to assimilate while maintaining difference.

Charlotte Mary Yonge's Victorian novel The Daisy Chain (1856) is not a text that has been discussed in terms of sexual violence. A “family story” that apparently inspired Alcott's Little Women (1869), The Daisy Chain has been most often considered a novel about the conflict between female vocation and religious duty. However, in this essay I argue that The Daisy Chain is also a novel that grapples openly with the problem of child sexual assault and features violence against women and girls as an accepted custom of what Berlant and Warner call the “heterosexual life narrative” (“Sex in Public”). Our postmodern abstraction of rape and the terminology surrounding rape have made sexual assault harder to “see” in both reality and representation, but in the context of the #MeToo movement, this essay pushes for an understanding of rape in The Daisy Chain as an event that happens in plain sight. Toggling between the two meanings of the word “overlook,” I argue that rape is a normalized custom of heterosexual belonging that can only be seen in the novel by girls with bad vision. Ethel May's myopia allows her to see what the rest of her family overlooks: rape in public.

This essay reads Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) as a previously unrecognized contribution to Victorian discourses around democracy. Approaching the novel through the parliamentary reform debate of the late 1850s and through Dickens's earlier writings about American democracy, I argue that this historical narrative of the French Revolution elaborates Victorian liberals’ fears that democracy will, on one hand, devalue individuality and produce a world of sameness or, on the other, overvalue individual sovereignty, giving way to isolating difference and social fragmentation. Despite his deep ambivalence about democratic reform, Dickens uses the novel to imagine alternative forms of political representation. The motif of “echoing footsteps” is one key example of the utopian democratic fantasy that the novel develops. In the “echoing footsteps” passages, Dickens appropriates the theories of Charles Babbage for political purposes, proposing that the earth's atmosphere is a medium that contains a complete democratic record of all the sounds made by every individual in existence. In this respect, the novel anticipates a concept of democracy as individual expression that today increasingly threatens democratic institutions.

This article investigates two collaborative (and little-known) novels published in the early 1890s periodical The Gentlewoman. The collaborations turn on, and center, a heroine whose reputation, choices, and actions stand as the locus of investigation; the business of interpreting a woman's character brings multiple writers, from many walks of life, together in a shared enterprise shaped by ongoing disagreement, for how to interpret the heroine evolves week by week. The two texts disrupt not only their own reading of their heroine but stage, through their very form, that any fixed, stable, or unitary reading of womanhood is impossible.

This essay reads George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) in dialogue with mid-Victorian debates on British nationality law, illuminating the larger questions of nationality and community that Eliot considered throughout her career. The 1860s, the decade in which the novel is set, witnessed a transformation in the law of subjecthood that culminated in the Naturalization Act (1870). In the lead up to the act, officials reconsidered the doctrine of “indelible allegiance” and debated whether and how the legal status of a subject should reflect an individual's choice and commitments. In the novel, Eliot approaches these issues by examining nationality as an individual experience in addition to a philosophical issue. For example, although both Sir Hugo Mallinger and Mordecai Cohen are British subjects, Mordecai's identity as a Jew conflicts with his legal status—to his great distress. Eliot uses Mordecai's proposal for a Jewish state to engage with an alternative form of national identity: one in which legal identity aligns with cultural and ethnic indices. In tackling these issues, Eliot exposes the complications and contradictions of national identity, showing how nationality law functions as a battleground for larger conflicts over the fate of nationality, both in Britain and beyond.

By situating Anna Kingsford's vegetarian writings within the paired context of late-Victorian dietetic discourse and modern posthuman philosophy, this article demonstrates both the Victorian association between diet and evolution and the contemporary applications of late-nineteenth-century dietary ethics. Kingsford was a leading scientist, antivivisector, feminist, and mystic who helped shape the Victorian vegetarian movement. Her influential rhetoric emphasized that vegetarianism would nourish interspecies relations and allow Victorians to materialize novel forms of subjectivity, kinship, community, and responsibility appropriate for the post-Darwinian landscape. This article reads her foundational vegetarian treatise, The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), along with her published lectures on vegetarianism through the overlapping lenses of posthumanism and new materialism, illuminating the congruence between Kingsford's call to embody ethics and the contemporary posthuman call to become an ecologically situated self. I argue that by framing vegetarianism as a generative, affirmative kin-making practice, grounded in the shared materiality and interests of humans and nonhumans, Kingsford articulates a posthuman dietary ethics.

The Dictionary of National Biography, published between 1885 and 1900, was one of Britain's biggest cyclopedia projects. The rampant expansion of the nation's archives, private collections, and museums produced an abundance of materials that frustrated the dictionary's editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, especially because methodologies for making order of such materials were underdeveloped. Adding to their frustration was the sense of impending doom felt generally in Britain after the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics in 1859. Entropy put an end to the presiding belief in the infinite energy that fueled Britain's economic development and therefore challenged Victorian biography's premise that the capacity for self-development was boundless. Like the physicists of the era, these dictionary makers searched for ways to circumvent entropy's deadening force and reenergize their world. This project would not actually be achieved, however, until the twentieth century when Claude Shannon published his “Information Theory” in 1948. I argue that in an attempt to get out from under the chaos of information overload, the editors of the DNB invented new methods to organize information that anticipated Shannon's revolutionary theory and changed the way that we think, write, and work.

This essay examines an important subgenre of the Victorian ghost story: narratives of phantom vehicles. Wilkie Collins's “The Last Stage Coachman” (1843), Charles Dickens's “The Story of the Bagman's Uncle” (1837), and Amelia Edwards's “The Phantom Coach” (1864), among others, feature vehicles from the past that return to haunt the living. I argue that that by using ghosts to express nostalgia for more human(e) modes of transportation, Victorian writers explore what it means to feel profound attachments to material things that are no longer accessible. The longing for lost objects results in a grotesque materiality that blurs the line between persons and objects. This is an unusual strain of commodity fetishism, an objectification of persons and animation of things provoked by a desire for a time in which these categories were distinct. In the first two sections, I focus on mid-Victorian writings that explore the process through which transportation nostalgia triggers uncanny exchanges of the human and the thing, thus exposing nostalgia itself as a dehumanizing and even violent process. In the final part, I discuss Rudyard Kipling's “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1885) as a narrative that revives this spectral tradition within the context of imperial nostalgia and racial labor.

This article examines Thomas Hardy's conflicting responses to late-Victorian debates about grammatical prescriptivism and linguistic purism. While Hardy claimed that “purism, whether in grammar or vocabulary, almost always means ignorance,” he also frequently expressed his interest in the (perhaps unrealizable) ideal of a “pure English” founded on fixed and unequivocal grammatical rules. Focusing on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a novel subtitled “A Pure Woman,” I argue that this ambivalence informed the grammar of Hardy's prose style in his fiction. In this novel, Hardy employs the ambiguous modality of the English language, the imprecise grammatical distinction between the indicative statement of facts and the subjunctive elaboration of conceptions and hypotheses, both to sustain and to interrogate the binary of the real and the ideal that underpins his simultaneous critique and defense of the notion of “purity.” This use of modality highlights an analogy between Hardy's views on moral and linguistic purity: in each case, he rejects narrow estimations of purity, while nonetheless championing an ideal—of “pure English” and the “pure woman”—that transcends the limited perspectives of conventional purisms.

It is to Alice Meynell that Coventry Patmore gives the only manuscript of The Angel in the House (1854–62) in 1893. But Meynell's actual house at the time, 47 Palace Court, was built with money from Jamaican sugar and rum plantations owned by her father, the legitimated descendant of plantation owners and enslaved persons. In this article, I seek to reconnect Meynell's work to its Jamaican context, building on the work of scholars—from Adela Pinch to Yopie Prins—who have tracked the influence of her prosody, her theology, and her sense of community.

This essay examines the literary career of Anglo-Irish peer Lewis Strange Wingfield (1842-1891) in relation to the rise of investigative journalism and Victorian debates over the treatment of mental illness. Situating his work in the context of the first covert investigations into asylums in Britain and the United States, it focuses on Wingfield's use of disguise to infiltrate a private London asylum for the purpose of researching his novel Gehenna; or, Havens of Unrest (1882). Wingfield's pioneering experiment in undercover authorship, we argue, sheds new light on investigative journalism's impact on both the form and thematics of the nineteenth-century realist novel.

This essay turns on a quiet, though intriguing, expression—the sigh—and considers the aesthetic work that it performs in the novels of Thomas Hardy. While the primary focus of the essay is the aesthetic, communicative, and biological functions of the sigh itself, the broader imperative is to demonstrate how paralanguage was implicated in broader nineteenth-century debates about evolution. It does this by setting Hardy's sighs in conversation with Herbert Spencer's essay “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857). Hardy's writing dramatizes a comparable associative relationship between paralanguage, listening, and sympathy to that which Spencer proposed in “The Origin” but does not replicate the ideological conditions of Spencer's model, which had reserved the highest forms of sympathy for the “cultivated” few. Hardy's aesthetic interest in the sigh, I argue, is more overtly related to how the biosemiotics of paralanguage communicate insights into emotional conditions that are outside the grasp of language.

The popularity of Mary Ward's novel Robert Elsmere (1888) has been attributed to readers who identified with the title character's loss of faith. This article offers a new account of Robert Elsmere's sales as it considers the book alongside John Inglesant (1881), another best-selling novel of religious experience. I argue that readers were drawn not to the representation of the protagonists’ experience but to the chance the books offered of exploring an expanding range of religious positions. Their appeal thus lay not in their resonances with private religious experience but in the way they fostered what I call “public reading.”