This article explores the narrative functions of domestic accidents in Victorian fiction. Taking Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House (1873) as a case study, it critically parses how popular fiction engaged with competing explanations of how or why accidents occur. As a new understanding of chance, risk, and statistical likelihood in the nineteenth century began to reshape the representation of accidents, narratives navigated shifting concepts of personal misfortune, of providence and poetic justice, as well as of probability. In Yonge's novel, domestic accidents demonstrate risk-management at home, promoting a concept that complicates narrative expectations both of divine punishment and of conventional conversion patterns.

This article takes up the social production of race in nineteenth-century India through picaresque fiction. Through readings of Rudyard Kipling, Dion Boucicault, and W. M. Thackeray, it shows how picaresque form served as a specific mechanism of racial stabilization, a means of producing a consciously stopgap racial binary through the intervention of a third, triangulating racial term: Irishness. Understanding the triangular structure of whiteness’ “shapeshifting” brings into sharper relief the connections between three important scholarly foci regarding race in India: the ambiguous and fluid boundaries of Anglo-Indian whiteness, the belated assignment of “blackness” to native Indian populations, and the constant resignifications of Irish identity that demographic overrepresentation in India entailed. The case study of the picaresque reveals an imperialist culture more strategic and more self-aware about its own racial construction than is sometimes supposed; the genre served as a key means by which nonmetropolitan colonialist Victorians theorized and constructed their own relation to whiteness.

This paper explores the genre of the botanical gothic, a derivative of the fin de siècle adventure novel in which (generally male) British explorers engage in combat with fictitious killer vegetation from the colonial periphery. I argue that the carnivorous plant of the botanical gothic is intimately entangled with another “man-eating” figure: that of the New Woman. Through a reading of H. G. Wells's “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), Algernon Blackwood's “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912), and Beatrice Grimshaw's “The Tale of the Scarlet Butterflies” (1908), I demonstrate the extent to which the monstrous plant is implicitly gendered as threateningly female and depicted as a sort of exoticized vegetal femme fatale that lures weak-minded men to their demise. This, I argue, builds upon contemporaneous anxieties surrounding feminine sexual independence and the destabilization of gender roles in order to create an excessively sensualized feminine plant “rival” to supplant—and indeed queer—the normatively gendered dynamic of the local, domestic space. Male subjects in such narratives are emasculated under the threateningly penetrative agencies of the carnivorous plant that becomes a vegetal stand-in, I suggest, for the deviant and “man-eating” sexuality attributed to the New Woman figure herself.

The unprecedented popularity of Charles Dickens's first serial novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37), among all classes of readers helped shape Britain's mass reading public. The irrevocable change that Dickens effected on Victorian print culture is well established, but there is little discussion of how his early works interpreted the print culture in which they first circulated. I approach Pickwick according to the perspective of a little-known contemporary response, “Sam Weller's Scrap Sheet (1837),” printed by John Cleave. “Sam Weller's Scrap Sheet” cleverly reproduces the narrative, form, and material of Pickwick according to the perspective of a laboring-class reader. Its attention to print material and class identity informs a new reading of Pickwick: in order to unify disparate reading and writing cultures, I argue, Pickwick fictively binds together materials sourced from a variety of print cultures and redefines them unanimously as “paper.” As the “Scrap Sheet” makes clear, this effaces the productive agency of the “papers’” originating contexts. Tying together discussions from Pickwick’s reception history, print history, and media studies, this paper more broadly examines the tensions that accompanied shifting relationships to material print in early-industrial England.

Population was a socially significant yet politically precarious concept in nineteenth-century Britain. In order to highlight the affective implications of “population,” this essay examines Harriet Martineau's fiction in the context of early Victorian concerns over population growth and contemporary thoughts of political economy. As an avid supporter of Thomas Malthus, Martineau maintains that “proportionate labor” is the determining factor in national stability, but her use of sentimental fiction in Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) reveals aspects of the population crisis that are not accounted for by the classic political economists. Martineau's fiction presents population as a phenomenon collectively felt among Victorians rather than as an objective number that represents sociological truth. In her modification of the Malthusian principles to encompass affective negotiations that extend beyond individual morals, Martineau emphasizes the importance of somatic experience in shaping the nineteenth-century understanding of population. Furthermore, as Martineau's narrative resolution to the population crisis comes from well-managed emigration, her works demonstrate that geographical colonial expansion operated as an essential condition in establishing a nationally sustainable idea of population. Reassessing Martineau's literary and historical significance as an innovative successor of Malthus unveils a sophisticated Victorian nexus of population theory and the collective feelings of empire.