Crossing the Channel for the first time, Lucy Snowe, the autobiographical voice of Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 Villette, beholds a vision:

Brontë’s description of Europe imagined, or seen, for the first time by a rootless, adventuresome British woman has often been taken as emblematic of the Victorian experience of the Continent: a quasi-Gothic, quasi-Romantic land offering pleasures both gemütlich and ‘imperial’, pleasures that promise a release from British social strictures. It accords well with our experience of a large number of Victorian writers, from the Brownings to George Meredith, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, to name only a few, for whom ‘Europe’ represented both inspiration and refuge, whether that Europe be Bohemian Paris or the Italy of the Risorgimento. The passage does not end on such a rainbow-tinged note, however. Characteristically, Lucy Snowe retracts: ‘Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader – or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral – an alliterative, text-hand copy – “Day-dreams are delusions of the demon.”

Imagine, if you will, the following: a boy born to English parents, in Calcutta, during the waning years of the Napoleonic Wars. The boy's father dies four years later, and the boy is soon thereafter sent away from his mother - who had in the meantime resumed a prior attachment to an army captain - to distant England, where he will be schooled. (En route, the young boy catches sight of the exiled Bonaparte, tending the garden in his St Helena retreat.) His schooling is perfectly correct by the standards of his class and time, and perfectly nightmarish; he is initiated into the rituals of English social formation by the tyrannies, physical, moral, and sexual, of the pre- Victorian public school, and memories of these humiliations and the loneliness consequent upon them will follow the boy into adulthood and middle age. Youthful degradation leads to a prolonged period of diffident attempts to start a career and more serious cultural experimentation: an undistinguished period of time at Cambridge; travels to Paris, Weimar, and beyond, where the young man develops tastes for bohemian life; and a rapid dissipation of his patrimony thanks to gambling, unwise investments, and a bank failure. This once-genteel young man then turns to the London Grub Street of his day for a living, and begins to turn out spirited and witty sketches for newspapers and magazines. The list of his published pieces numbers in the hundreds, and the young man has married - unwisely, as it turns out, for his wife inexplicably and inexorably falls into a mental illness that results in her confinement in a series of asylums.