Although the OED's first citation for “journalism” is dated 1833 (it comes from Westminster Review), the current dramatic expansion of digital resources suggests that scholarly use of Victorian journals may be reaching a point of transition. In addition, the number, variety, breadth, and depth of recent studies, most of them finished before the new materials went online, is truly remarkable.

The story of Jack Sheppard, a jailbreaker hanged for theft in 1724, inspired William Harrison Ainsworth in 1839 to write a historical romance chronicling and fictionalizing Sheppard's exploits. Though first published in a middle-class magazine, Ainsworth's serialization of Sheppard's career in Jack Sheppard: A Romance (1839–1840) subsequently caused a sensation among lower-class audiences for whom the novel was not originally intended. The wide dissemination of Sheppard's story among the lower classes in ballads, songs, cheap plagiarisms, and theatrical performances created a moral panic for contemporary middle-class critics who were concerned with the implications of such material in lower-class culture. Thus, despite the novel's initial reception in the middle-class press as another pleasant and harmless romance, it soon became reviled as a source of inspiration for would-be Jack Sheppards everywhere.

Presented here for the first time since their publication over a century ago are two previously unknown, undocumented periodical writings by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). To be sure, this discovery underscores Richard Dalby's assertion, shared too by his co-author, William Hughes, in Bram Stoker: A Bibliography (2004), that “more of [Stoker's] ephemeral stories and articles may still be awaiting discovery in obscure newspapers and magazines” (“Quest for Bram Stoker” 12). But more still, for one like Stoker whose shorter literary works, outside of “Dracula's Guest” (1913), lie on the periphery of a legacy that for many offers little distinction from the world's greatest of vampire narratives, the necessity to examine his periodical writings is twofold. For one, it will aid in the task of elucidating Stoker-as-writer; but more critically, it will allow us to engage in dialogue with scholars like Richard Dalby, William Hughes, and others who call into question our insistent tunnel view of Dracula as Stoker's only legacy worthy of consideration.

IN 1895, GRANT ALLEN PUBLISHED A NEW WOMAN NOVEL entitled The Woman Who Did. This treatise-like novel appeared as part of the Keynotes Series, a group of ideologically progressive texts published by John Lane for Bodley Head in the 1890s. As Margaret Diane Stetz writes, Lane made this series “a haven for ‘New Woman’ fiction, naturalistic short stories, and ‘decadent’ poetry and art” (72). Marketed as status and sex objects (81), many of the thirty-three novels and short-story collections that make up the series concern themselves with New Woman issues such as marriage and female sexuality. Lane had taken the name for this series from George Egerton's Keynotes (1893), a collection of short stories told from the perspective of an emancipated woman. The Woman Who Did, published two years later, also featured a New Woman and became the most notorious book of the series. Combining a free-love, anti-marriage message with a tragic plot, Allen's novel focuses on a clergyman's daughter, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry the father of her child, Alan Merrick, on feminist principles. Unwilling to enter an institution that she compares to “vile slavery” (43), she chooses to live unmarried with her lover and daughter until his death. She withstands the calumny of family and friends and years of grieving and penury only to discover in the end that her daughter rejects her feminism and views her illegitimacy not as the “supreme privilege” her mother believed it to be, but rather as a “curse” (132). In a way typical of New Woman novels, the story ends with the heroine's suicide.

Two marble statues, each representing a reclining, sleeping nude of somewhat indeterminate sex, sit at the heart of Swinburne's early collections of poetry: the Hellenistic Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Figure 1) in his Poems and Ballads (1866) and Michelangelo's allegorical figure La Notte (Figure 2) in his “In San Lorenzo” sonnet in Songs before Sunrise (1871). Swinburne's dealings with the Hermaphrodite have had a long and ever increasing bibliography; his fascination with Michelangelo's sculpture has, to my knowledge, not yet provoked much scholarly attention. This imbalance may partly be ascribed to the immediate sex appeal of the Hermaphrodite – this “late Romantic freak,” as Camille Paglia appropriately called it (413) – which in the gendered critical discourse of the 1990s has given rise to a whole range of exciting explorations of Swinburne and the body, Swinburne and androgyny, Swinburne and poetic blindness. The Michelangelo statue was, however, turned into a poetic and political monument by Swinburne under far less erotically charged circumstances in the volume dedicated to Guiseppe Mazzini, and opens for different routes of inquiry.

First published in The Phantom Rickshaw (1888), the fifth volume in A. H. Wheeler & Co.'s “Indian Railway Library” series, “The Man Who Would Be King” may be the best and is almost certainly the last story that Rudyard Kipling wrote while still living in India. It is, then, the culmination of an annus mirabilis that saw its twenty-three-year-old author publish six books, albeit short ones, and achieve widespread fame in India. He also garnered sufficient acclaim in England that he would decide to resign his editorial position at George Allen's two Anglo-Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer, in favor of a literary life in London. In light of these biographical facts, readers might reasonably expect the story to offer a summative, even authoritative, conclusion about life and empire on the subcontinent that Kipling had represented so abundantly all year.

The significance of the Waterloo episode in Vanity Fair remains somewhat obscure. Early reviewers of the novel either ignored it or suggested its downright insignificance: “The battle of Waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death, and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred of other ways” (Rigby 79). Furthermore, when compared to Stendhal's La chartreuse de Parme and Hugo's Les misérables, two novels where a report of the battle is at least attempted, Vanity Fair looks exceptional. The novel's mimetic elusiveness vis-à-vis the battle has been a source of puzzle and the object of some critical contention. In line with John Carey, who argued that “Vanity Fair is built round a thunderous void” (189), John Sutherland suggested that “Thackeray's battlefield reticence” impinged on the novel's “historical fabric” producing “gaping, but evidently carefully placed, holes” (15), the larger being (no pun intended) Waterloo. Some critics explained away this omission by invoking Thackeray's anti-heroic restraint, a position best expressed by Tolstoy: “For an historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men” (1309). Other readers blamed the silencing effect of an elegiac trauma – an “agony of glory,” in Coleridge's terms – not uncommonly affecting the winning side in a violent conflict. One could also adduce reasons of epistemological honesty, in line with Tolstoy's blunt assertion that “in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie” (1310).

IS THERE A VICTORIAN WRITER who has won as much attention in the last few years, critical or popular, as Oscar Wilde? One or two decades ago, Hardy, Dickens, and the Brontës were the Victorians that large numbers of people wanted to read, discuss, and see on film and stage. It seems like another era that saw Nicholas Nickelby ruling on the Great White Way. The decline of Dickens’s mass appeal was probably signaled some time ago with an episode of the TV series Law and Order in which a murder case resulted from a business feud over a disastrous Broadway production of Bleak House. The Brontës have fared no better; the musical Jane Eyre, after some of the worst reviews ever to have greeted a musical, recently closed on Broadway, its producers in its last weeks having resorted to advertising on milk cartons. Although Hardy reportedly continues to top the sales of nineteenth-century British classics, Michael Winterbottom’s 2001 film adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, set during the California Gold Rush, played to mixed reviews and nearly empty theaters, its gloomy fealty to the spirit of Hardy’s fiction, not unlike Winterbottom’s brooding version of Jude the Obscure, an evident obstacle for most audiences.

In 1529, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, descendant of the Timurid dynasty and founder of the Mughal empire, wept at the sight of melons. A mere fruit had reminded Babur of the homeland he had left behind in central Asia. In a letter to Khwaja Kalan, the emperor writes of the drudgeries of a ruler in a foreign land, who is forced to do without the tastes of home: “How can one forget the pleasures of that country? . . . Recently a melon was brought, and as I cut it and ate it I was oddly affected. I wept the whole time I was eating it” (423). The Baburnama, a personal record of the establishment of a new empire in the subcontinent, might seem like an unusual place to begin an essay on Victorian India. But Babur's nostalgia for the home left behind in Samarkand poignantly anticipates some of the hidden longings of the British as Company Raj gave way to Crown Raj in India. While the East India Company attempted to oust the Mughal rulers between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, after India was incorporated into the Empire, the British would also attempt to don the mantle of the Mughals. On 1 November 1858, when India officially became part of Queen Victoria's Empire, the British inherited the Mughal's melons. Whether it was roast beef or mulligatawny, a pint of pale ale or a chhota peg, the British discovered their own versions of Babur's melons over time – an idea of homeland contained in a mouthful.

The criticisms of society made by Thomas Hood in the poems he wrote in the years immediately prior to his death in 1845 are from a very particular stance. The poems specifically measure society against Christian values. Thus, Hood bewails how “Christian charity” should “hang your head” (“The Workhouse Clock” 63), or on its “rarity” (“The Bridge of Sighs” 43).The seamstress in “The Song of the Shirt” expresses disbelief that “this is Christian work” (16). The pauper in “A Pauper's Christmas Carol” muses over his treatment on “our Saviour's natal day” (2). The gin to which the beleaguered are driven is the “dram of Satan” and is drunk, “While Angels sorrow, and Demons grin” (“A Drop of Gin” 11, 72). In “The Lady's Dream” the neglectful attitude shown by society to its suffering members is damningly put alongside the Biblical reassurance that, “even the sparrow falls / Not unmarked of God” (“The Lady's Dream” 77–78). “The Lay of the Labourer,” as we shall see, also makes play with Scriptural references. In this Christian analysis of society's ills, the suffering and going wrong of society are the product of setting aside God's wisdom in the decrees He gives about how to organise human dealings.

BY THE CLOSE OF THE PREVIOUS CENTURY, English music-hall or variety, an entertainment form that incorporated comic acts, sketch comedy, dance, even animal acts, was drawing a broad base of middle-class patrons, and losing its exclusive character as working-class entertainment. “Variety” halls like the Alhambra or the Empire now claimed the attention and lucre of a new mass audience. Music-hall was also, I would argue, a proving ground where enterprising intellectuals could flex their evaluative muscle. Perhaps more than any other Late Victorian man of letters, critic and poet Arthur Symons frequented the music-hall with an eye toward representing it, a service that he regularly performed for The Star newspaper and elite cultural venues such as The Fortnightly Review.

It is generally agreed that Robert Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, in expressing his notions about painting, is to a certain extent putting forth the poet's own artistic creed, which was very much like George Eliot's: “to give a faithful account of men and things.” The Florentine monk captured in painting those he saw from day to day, and, after writing “Fra Lippo Lippi,” Browning himself became increasingly insistent upon basing his poems on contemporary people and surrounding them with the bric-a-brac of daily life. Following Men and Women (1855), then, Dramatis Personae (1864) marks the end of Browning's overwhelming predilection for the historical personage; thenceforward he was to have a much greater interest in presenting the men and women of his day. Of course, some poems are concerned with the contemporary only indirectly, such as “A Death in the Desert,” the poet's answer to Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus (1863). Many others, however, portray men of the day speaking in their own voices. “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium,’” for example, consists of the voice of D. D. Home, the American medium, whom Mrs. Browning had admired. This interest in treating contemporaries seems much of the time to have accompanied a desire to enlarge his characters' living space. In such works as Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), Browning allowed his dramatis personae to speak for about a hundred and fifty pages instead of for a few hundred lines as most often before. Still, his contemporaries continued to have prominent voices in collections of shorter poems: Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, especially “Clive” (1880); Jocoseria, especially “Donald” (1883), and Parleyings with Certain People, especially “With George Bubb Doddington” (1887).

As Jan Assmann writes, the concept of “cultural memory” both “draws our attention to the role of the past in constituting our world” and also investigates “the motives that prompt our recourse to it” (ix). Cultural memory is transmitted through a variety of mediators ranging from texts and images to commemorative sites, whose complex aesthetic and ideological configurations – whether associated with trauma or glory – are a source of great interest. In his New Science (1725–44), Giambattista Vico claimed that “humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando” (8), highlighting the importance burial rituals had in the creation of civilised society. The commemoration of the dead is indeed at the core of cultural memory as the foundation on which the social compact between the living and the dead rests.

One of the constant factors in Robert Browning's life was his love of music, a love which he repaid by devoting two of the finest examples of his poetic art to musical subjects. “Abt Vogler” and “A Toccata of Galuppi's” are among the most frequently studied and anthologized poems, the latter being a particular favorite with general reader and critic alike. Yet had Browning never written these two poems, his attachment to music would have been just as apparent through the numerous references to music, concerts, and musical personalities in his other poems and his letters. In fact, Browning's knowledge of music and his status as an amateur musician are commonplaces of the Browning legend, a part of the received Gospel. But while we know a great deal about Browning's youthful training in music, his technical knowledge of musical forms, and his philosophy of music, we know very little about the important matter of where his taste in music lay. If one reads Browning's poems and letters with the express purpose of discovering his musical likes and dislikes, the results are surprising and—in terms of his “musical” poems—rather revealing, for they indicate that Browning, living in the great age of musical Romanticism, was something of a musical reactionary who looked with disdain on the great composers of his era and on their musical styles, preferring instead the forms and performing techniques of the preceding century.

In the summer of 1847, the nineteen-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti came across a copy of Robert Browning's anonymous first book in the library of the British Museum. This discovery of Pauline (published in 1833) by a young poet already enthusiastic about Browning has long been justly famous. Not being able to obtain the book from the publisher – it had long since been removed from sale – Rossetti was forced to transcribe the entire text into a notebook. While doing so, he noticed a similarity between certain passages of Pauline and one of Browning's acknowledged early works, Paracelsus (1835). Several months later, on 17 October 1847, Rossetti wrote to Browning to ask if he were the author of Pauline. Browning's reply – the beginning of an important literary friendship – is presented here for the first time.