Throughout his life Stevenson scanned experience with reverted eyes. His passion for the past captured his attention so that he often stared at the present through the glass of memory. As if still studying the stationer's window where, on Saturday mornings, he and his nurse Cummy attempted to read, through the pictures, the “forbidden” sequels to the stories in Cassell's Family Papers, Stevenson at a later time continued to recapture and sometimes extend the “golden moments” and places of his youth by looking at the remembered images displayed within his mind's eye. These pictures brought him closer to the life he had left behind. They helped him re-embody the absence and break the silence of the glass that stood between him and his earlier years. Consequently, the recalled sight of Tibby Birse, a seamstress who had once come to the Edinburgh house and sewn with Cummy, “sitting with her legs crossed in a masculine manner; and swinging her foot emphatically” made audible the “thin, perpetual shrill” voice of her gossiping (Colvin 4: 264–65) and thereby, nearly forty years later (7 December 1893), breathed life into a detail and resuscitated a moment belonging to an earlier time.

In book five of sordello (1840), Browning images the process of historical change in architectural terms. History is a building to be destroyed and rebuilt by successive generations:

… at his arm's wrench,

Charlemagne's scaffold fell; but pillars blench

Merely, start back again — perchance have been

Taken for buttresses: crash every screen,

Hammer the tenons better, and engage

A gang about your work, for the next age

Or two, of Knowledge, part by Strength and part

By Knowledge! (5: 221–28)

The metaphor engages with the nineteenth century's great preoccupation with the historically-determined nature of architectural form — its sense that, as Owen Jones declared in 1856, “architecture is the material expression of the wants, the faculties, and the sentiments, of the age in which it is created” (5). The Classical-Gothic opposition that structured most contemporary debates about aesthetic value in architecture is economically encapsulated by Browning in the mutation of the collapsed Classical pillars into Gothic buttresses. It is the economy of the reference that indicates Browning's easy familiarity with those contemporary architectural debates. He makes use of architectural images and ideas in a number of poems, a fact that has gone relatively unremarked in Browning studies. The theme occurs throughout Sordello and is a major element in “Old Pictures in Florence” and “Bishop Blougram's Apology.” His interest in architecture, I contend, derived, like that of most of his contemporaries, from his preoccupation with history. I intend to examine the precise manifestation of that interest and the ways in which he illuminated, synthesized, and rejected elements of the architecture debates, which reveal much about the particular nature of his concern with history.

In her stimulating book The Animal Estate, Harriet Ritvo notes the frequent interchange of terms for describing domestic servants and domestic animals in nineteenth-century discourse, and she emphasizes the especially distinguished role played by horses in the establishment of this rhetoric (18–19). Philip Hamerton, for example, writing in 1874, announced that “if there is any thing in the world of nature that seems clear, morally, it is that man has an authentic right to demand reasonable service from the horse” (qtd. in Ritvo 20), and the Rev. J. G. Wood, in 1885, decreed that “in return for its means of existence, the horse is bound to give to man the benefit of its labour” (Wood xviii). This anthropomorphic shift, moreover, is fully reversible: an article in Chambers's Journal for 1855 describes how Mrs. Robinson's slack governance of her household has resulted in anarchy — because she has “long let the reins go,” Heaven only knows “where her household will drive to” (“Kitchen and Parlour” 98). A manual on domestic management quoted by Pamela Horn advises that “the greatest ‘kindness’ we can exercise towards” our employees “is to endeavour, by a mild rein, to keep them in the path of duty” (112–13).

In 1843, during a decade marked by political and cultural recognition of the industrialization and urbanization of Britain, a number of plays concerned with city life and the representation of the city were produced on the popular stage in London. These plays were variously called The Bohemians of Paris, The Scamps of London, The Mysteries of Crime, The Mysteries of London or The Mysteries of Paris. Arguably the first and most influential play about the city in the nineteenth century was William Thomas Moncrieff's Tom and Jerry; or Life in London (first performed in 1821). Imitated and adapted throughout the century (Nicoll 96–97), Moncrieff's play was itself an adaptation of Pierce Egan's book, Life in London, which was illustrated by the brothers George and Robert Cruikshank. This particular combination of writers and illustrators is a powerful one, as, collectively and individually, these artists had much to do with the activity and energy of urban popular culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. George Cruikshank, especially, is important in the modernization of the popular art of this period, while William Moncrieff was a prolific dramatist and notable for his use of topical material. Not only was Moncrieff one of the first dramatists to adapt Egan's Life in London for the stage, but his interest in the theatricality of the city and its richness as theatrical source material continued in later melodramas, particularly The Heart of London and The Scamps of London. It is in the Scamps, Bohemians, and Mysteries plays that early century representations of the city assume their most powerful form, and it is William Moncrieff's version which will be my specific focus here.

On march 30, 1859, according to a Times court report, a young woman named Mary Jones was tried for the crime of willful murder of her illegitimate child: for infanticide. She had concealed her pregnancy and the labor, and a suspicious neighbor found the child's corpse with its throat cut and the bloody knife lying next to it. Jones pled guilty to the charge. The court reporter writes that she “sobbed out a few incoherent words” to the effect that she was in too much agony after the birth to know what she was doing. Jones could only be found guilty if the baby was proved to be born alive, and to this end a surgeon testified that it was and that the cut throat was the cause of death. The jury accordingly found her guilty but recommended mercy. The judge, Mr. Baron Martin, is quoted as saying, “he hoped that her unfortunate example would be a warning to other young women.” He sentenced her to death, apparently thinking the jury's verdict required him to do so. Afterwards, however, as the Times reported on April 8, Jones's execution was respited, through the intervention of the Home Secretary which was invited by the judge.

Finding themselves with more money and more time in which to spend it, the middle classes began in the 1860s to renegotiate their relationship to the arts, and to theater in particular. Recording and rendering visible this process of cultural change are the popular sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley's Secret, and the numerous dramatic adaptations of her work. Braddon shares with Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott the distinction of being one of the novelists whose work was most frequently adapted for the stage. Unlike Dickens, however, she often responded favorably to the efforts of her adapters. This congenial relationship resulted, no doubt, from the three years she spent performing on the provincial stage in the late 1850s. Her continuing interest in the theater and theater people is reflected in their frequent appearance in her novels.

Evelyn pickering De Morgan (1855–1919) produced a large body of work, primarily paintings but also some sculptural projects, during a career spanning half a century. The great majority of her images include women as protagonists, often as allegorical personifications but with an unusually wide range of characteristics. She created women as members of a constructed and often constraining civilization, who exhibit at times a sort of drooping resignation, but she also represented women as powerful natural elements, actively in control of their destinies. Her art stands out as an attempt to blend metaphysical concerns about material embodiment and spiritual transcendence, grounded in the Platonic ideal, with concerns about social constraints and creative freedom that can be interpreted from a feminist perspective. By translating these fundamental issues about what it means to be human and, more specifically, female into an allegorical language that was unusual for a woman artist of the period (in fact, called “imprudently ambitious” by one critic1), she moved beyond the socially accepted “female iconography” of still life, landscape, and domestic narrative. Overlapping and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward the roles of women can be traced in her oeuvre, particularly in a body of images related to the theme of imprisonment.

Among the many anecdotes explaining Elizabeth Gaskell's entrance into the literary marketplace is one circulated by Travers Madge, a leading Manchester philanthropist. Gaskell allegedly told him that “the one strong impulse” to write Mary Barton came after visiting one particularly destitute laborer's cottage:

She was trying hard to speak comfort, and to allay those bitter feelings against the rich which were so common with the poor, when the head of the family took hold of her arm, and grasping it tightly said, with tears in his eyes, “Ay, ma'am, but have ye ever seen a child clemmed to death?” (Hompes 131)

While this anecdote ostensibly explains Gaskell's literary calling as a sacred duty and illustrates her expansive feminine sympathy, it also positions her work within the larger project of nineteenth-century philanthropy. As a lady visitor, she attempts to “speak comfort” and assuage working-class hostility toward the rich, but she finds herself in a discursive struggle with the workman, whose rough vernacular and even rougher hand threaten violence both to the lady and the narrative. Like the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge's poem, the nameless workman compels her to listen and accord him the authority that great suffering demands. He wrests the reader's attention away from the main figure of the anecdote, the benevolent “Mrs. Gaskell,” and renders her speechless — at least for a while. For it is his domestic tragedy which authorizes her literary vocation and enables her to present her work as a form of fictional philanthropy.

In this essay, I suggest that we may read Esther Summerson's narration in Bleak House through the lens of recent feminist theoretical speculations on mimicry and masquerade. I argue that Esther's narrative is a duplicitous one in that it redeploys masculine modes of discourse, calling attention to the production of women in that discourse. Writing a narrative about her life, Esther, in effect, copies masculine discourse, but she also writes over it imprinting her own signature. Esther's writing sheds much light on the text's obsessive focus on writing and copying; she produces copy, the copy of a Victorian ideal woman, but in doing so she engenders blots that preclude a unidimensional reading of her. I contend that Esther adopts a narrative veil; this then is her secret in the text which links feminine identity to mimicry and masquerade. At the center of the text is Dickens's mordant critique of the legal system and its machinations; similarly, I argue that Esther's narrative participates in the demolishing of the idea of a stable notion of feminine identity.

Taken together, the four books under review here make me feel, not too comfortably, like a character in Middlemarch: in the aggregate, recent work on George Eliot is so slight that it evokes books unwritten, mighty tasks not only unfinished, but unbegun. The comparative modesty of even excellent work like Rosemarie Bodenheimer's, the sense that criticism is returning, in a smaller compass with more scrupulous vision, to ground already broken, is symptomatic of a void in our generation's imagination. An adequate appraisal of George Eliot needs an ambition as encompassing as George Eliot's own, but we seem to have directed our intensity to smaller, slyer writers.

George Eliot lamented the decoration of her and George Henry Lewes's house, for which Owen Jones, the man behind the color scheme for the Crystal Palace, designed wallpaper and chose draperies. At the beginning of his chapter on Middlemarch in Novels Behind Glass, a detailed historicist study of Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot and the Great Exhibition, Andrew Miller quotes Eliot's lament: “Such fringing [sic] away of precious life in thinking of carpets and tables is an affliction to me and seems like a nightmare from which I shall find it bliss to awake into my old world of care for things quite apart from upholstery” (189). In the Afterword, Miller quotes the deathbed words of Oscar Wilde, whose earnestness about his own wallpapered predicament are quite in contrast with Eliot: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death…. One or the other of us has to go” (221).

Since carol christ's pioneering research in 1975 on the “finer optic” of Victorian poetry, the optic has become even finer in all senses of the word: refined, particular, precise, scientific, and, most importantly, thoroughly historical and material. The optical is no longer a metaphor, but a reality: a device, apparatus, or gadget whose lens-crafted appearance on the scene of vision enhances and alters “visuality,” a recently coined term for “how we moderns see seeing.” Terms which once stood solely upon metaphorical ground, as in W. D. Shaw's “The Optical Metaphor: Victorian Poetics and the Theory of Knowledge” (Victorian Studies, 1980), now refer to concrete practices, scientific optically monitored experiments, and lens and mirror evidentiary and entertainment venues that shaped internal and external life as “modern” during Queen Victoria's reign. In fact, her reign from 1837 until 1901 exactly corresponds with the era that saw the invention and gradual institutionalization of photo- and cinematographic techniques of imaging.