Old media can be scary – much scarier, ceteris paribus, than other objects of comparable antiquity. Film and television directors, as well as writers of fiction, who traffic in chills know that few things can insert a palpable sense of dread into a mise-en-scène more economically than a strategically placed daguerreotype (its dour or baleful inhabitants staring out from their world of sepia), a tinny voice issuing from an ancient radio, or the needle of a Victrola bobbing cracklingly in grooves of black vinyl. On the other hand, it is at least as much of a truism to say that new media, too, come freighted with anxieties as well as exhilarations: otherwise we would be less susceptible to narratives about being enslaved by a transpersonal Matrix, zombified by our cell phones, and so on. It should not surprise, then, that in our own media-saturated age a host of tropes and topoi derived from information technologies have tended to recur again and again in works of horror film and fiction. Many of these involve interactions between and among media: old technologies acting like new ones, and vice versa; categorial blurrings and hybridizations involving different media within a particular ecology, or the sense of an uncanny partnership or cooperation between them; and so on. Also common are tableaux of trans- or extra-medial transgression: e.g., the figure of dread escaping the representational field and entering the “real world” of the story. Then, too, there is the figure of prodigious or preternatural (and usually unasked-for) perceptual extension or augmentation, the trope of the technology that enables, or compels, one to see and/or hear more than is good for one.

In her groundbreaking bookMasks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989), Guari Viswanathan established that “the discipline of English came into its own” not in England but in India, as an instrument of cultural colonization: “As early as the 1820s, when the classical curriculum reigned supreme in England despite the strenuous efforts of some concerned critics to loosen its hold, English as the study of culture and not simply the study of language had already found a secure place in the British Indian curriculum” (2, 3). Pausing to summarize the English literary curriculum fostered by “government schools in midcentury India,” she lists the following poetical works, gleaned from a report reprinted for the House of Lords in 1853: “Richardson's Poetical Selections (Goldsmith, Gray, Addison, Pope, and Shakespeare), Otway's Venice Preserved, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, Pope's Iliad by Homer, [and] Milton's Paradise Lost (the first four books)” (54). Although Viswanathan does not identify Richardson or his Poetical Selections, she is right to head the list with that textbook, which is mentioned in many other government reports of the period, and which was instrumental in establishing a classroom canon of British poetry in India before any such curriculum had been determined in Great Britain.

The first English language newspaper in India began publication in 1780; by 1857, almost two hundred papers and periodicals had appeared – and many had quickly disappeared. An 1839 article in the Calcutta Literary Gazette partially attributed this high mortality rate to a lack of talented writers and to a desire among colonists for news from England:

Over the last thirty years the growing academic interest in both Victorian periodicals and women's issues in the nineteenth century has focussed interest on the women journalists who wrote for the serious quarterlies and monthlies published during this period. The part played by such writers as Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Frances Power Cobbe in the development of Victorian thought is now well known, while that of less prolific contributors is increasingly attracting scholarly attention. One of the authors gradually being rescued from oblivion is Anne Mozley (1809–1891), with her views on both contemporary literature and debates about the social position of women being seen as of interest.

Readers have long noted the pervasiveness of sympathy in George Eliot's work. But why always sympathy? One cannot fully answer this question without attending to a crucial and yet still understudied context for Eliot's work: evangelicalism. It is from evangelical thought and practice that she gleaned the concept of what I will call sympathetic “insight,” which evangelicals privileged for its ability to “see” the real and to move between the dichotomous barriers of the in/visible and in/external. I want to suggest that even after Eliot no longer found compelling its accompanying theology, sympathetic “insight” persisted in her imagination as a way to see into and within her realist fictional worlds.

IN RECENT YEARS, literary critics and historians have become more conscious of how advantageous it can be to bring together scholarly work in religious studies and contemporary theories of gender. While the texts I will evaluate here exhibit greater or lesser degrees of awareness of current theory in its purest form, all share considerable interest in analyzing Victorian religion with respect to questions of sex. From traditional approaches of social history applied to women to specific studies of authors, from collections of critical essays to a book-length edition of the gems of a nineteenth-century sisterhood's archive, the fields of religious studies and gender studies can no longer be separated in critical practice to the degree that they had been in the past. In general, cultural studies approaches have yet to catch up with the rich scholarly possibilities offered by an exploration of Victorian Christianity. For the purpose of this essay, I have not delved deeply into works of postcolonial studies, nor have I focused on book-length inquiries into traditions outside Christianity. To be sure, there is much to investigate in those areas. But for the most part, as of this writing, book-length publications are simply not yet available.Cynthia Scheihberg's important book, Women's Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), was released too late for full inclusion in my essay, but should be recognized as among the significant new work in the field. We are working with a field that is only twenty years old, one that has seen substantial growth and suggested numerous directions for future research.

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) has hitherto been read in two principal scientific contexts: those of evolutionary biology and thermodynamic physics. Numerous critics have situated the romance in the context of evolutionary biology and contemporary discourses of degeneration (McLean 11–40; Greenslade 32–41). Others have discussed it in the context of thermodynamic physics. For instance, Bruce Clarke has read The Time Machine as “a virtual allegory of classical thermodynamics,” and shows that its combination of physical and social entropy reflects a wider transfer within the period of concepts and metaphors from physical science to social discourses of degeneration (121–26). Neatly linking these scientific contexts with issues of form, Michael Sayeau has argued that the social and physical entropy that are themes of the romance are reflected in its narrative structure, which manifests a type of narrative entropy, and thereby raises the spectre of the end of fiction (109–46).

Visiting a missionary school for girls in the central Chinese city of Chungking in the early 1890s, British writer Alicia Little entertained some disquieting thoughts about instilling Western values in Chinese children. Her reflections in Intimate China on the benefits and hazards of such teaching instance Britain's increasingly conflicted views of China in the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the passage manifests the long-held Victorian view that the Chinese mind and culture had lain dormant for at least a century and needed Western aid to awaken them to their full potential. On the other hand, her unease about children made “susceptible of outside influences” admits both to the limited effects of Western teaching on entrenched Chinese traditions and to the dubious advantages of alienating individuals from the values of the country that must house their futures. Writing some thirty years after the Second Opium Wars, which formally opened China to foreign traders, travelers, and missionaries, and less than a decade before the Boxer Rebellion, in which thousands of foreigners and Chinese Christians were massacred in retaliations against Western influences, Little's observations foreground pivotal problems in Britain's evolving relationship with China as well as dispute conventional models of East-West relations in the nineteenth century.

In 1846 William John Thoms, who contributed the term “folklore” to the English language, commented in The Athenaeum that “belief in fairies is by no means extinct in England” (Merton 55). Thoms was not alone in his opinion; he merely echoed and endorsed the words of Thomas Keightley, the author of a popular and influential book, The Fairy Mythology. For believers were not limited to gypsies, fisherfolk, rural cottagers, country parsons, and Irish mystics. Antiquarians of the Romantic era had begun the quest for fairies, and throughout Victoria's reign advocates of fairy existence and investigators of elfin origins included numerous scientists, historians, theologians, artists, and writers. By the 1880s such leading folklorists and anthropologists as Sabine Baring-Gould, Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Lang, and Sir John Rhŷs were examining oral testimony on the nature and the customs of the “little folk” and the historical and archaeological remains left by them. At the beginning of the twentieth century eminent authors, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, swelled the ranks of those who held the fairy faith and publicized their findings. In all, in a remarkable “trickle up” of folk belief, a large number of educated Romantics, Victorians, and Edwardians speculated at length on whether fairies did exist or had at least once existed.

IN KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885), H. Rider Haggard describes the journey of three robust English men who successfully penetrate a sexualized landscape in southern Africa, depicted as both the body of the long-dead Queen of Sheba and that of her contemporary, King Solomon. The three English adventurers, led by the narrator Allan Quatermain, climb “Sheba's breasts” (26; ch. 2), traverse her torso, and arrive finally at the location where diamonds are stored inside her cavernous body, in the space Haggard calls “King Solomon's treasure chamber” (27; ch. 2). Narrative desire and the mystery of the Jewish patriarch's ancient empire propel these men through a series of male bonding adventures that lead to their arrival and conquest of the famed mines, where they pocket diamonds “as large as pigeon-eggs” (225; ch. 17) and plot their escape from what they fear may be a sealed cave.

In 1892 the celebrated physicist and chemist William Crookes commented on the existence of “an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electrical rays,” which he believed could revolutionize telegraphic communications (174). A few years later, and aided by Crookes's experiments with vacuums, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen successfully produced X-rays, a hitherto unrecorded form of electromagnetic radiation, which he tantalizingly described as “a new kind of invisible light” (Röntgen 413; Warner 256). Crookes was quick to speculate as to “the possibility of links between roentgen rays and the cerebral ganglia,” that an undiscovered organ in the brain might be “capable of transmitting and receiving . . . electrical rays” (Lyons 105; Crookes 176). X-rays, he thought, might prove a psychic counterpart to higher wavelength radio waves, allowing the transmission of messages telepathically rather than telegraphically, and even communication with the world of the spirits (Lyons 105). Crookes theorized that the parapsychological was intimately entwined with the findings of contemporary physics, occupying different zones of the same electromagnetic spectrum. An ardent Spiritualist, he believed that the ether, the “impalpable, invisible entity, by which all space is supposed to be filled” and which contained countless “channels of communication” also sustained “ghost-light . . . invisible to the naked eye” and acted as a medium that allowed “ethereal bodies to rise up” (Crookes 174; Warner 253–56). In other words, the matter through which light and electrical signals passed was envisaged as the same substance which allowed the spirits to fluctuate between visible and invisible forms. These links between the electromagnetic field and the occult, endorsed by Crookes and certain other members of his circles such as the Society for Psychical Research, anticipated turn-of-the-century associations between electricity, radiation and ancient Egypt which, through its reputation as the birthplace of magic, was central to Victorian conceptions of the supernatural.

Inspired by the power and influence that Charles Darwin attributed to heredity in On the Origin of Species (1859), Francis Galton developed a program of eugenics that he believed could shape Britain's progress as a nation by managing the evolutionary development of the British race. In Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), Galton summarizes this aim as “to learn how far history may have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course” (1–2). While this project, Galton's life's work, was largely a process of analysis and the development of dictates that could be put in place to shape the reproduction of the nation, it was also a project of imagination; not only was Galton himself imagining a different future for Britain, but in promoting his program, he appealed to the imaginations of his readers in an attempt to get them to share his vision.

The ideal of the British New Woman, variously representing feminist, activist, fashion reformer, and writer, has been the subject of renewed critical interest since the late twentieth century. Although symptomatic of its situation in the fin de siècle, which “names those things that were never quite assimilated into the high-Victorian moment,” since the 1980s the New Woman has transcended its polemical Victorian conceptualization to represent “prequels to modernism as well as sequels to Victorianism.” As Sally Ledger has argued, the New Woman, despite being largely a “discursive phenomenon,” was nonetheless historically significant and central to late Victorian literary culture.

In February 2003 my close friend Jeff Hubbard died in a car accident, taking the curve of an icy metro Detroit highway exit ramp too fast late one weekend night. He was twenty years old and had been living at home with his parents since we graduated from high school, working odd jobs—a host at a Mexican restaurant, a temporary letter carrier for the USPS—and helping take care of his young nephew. I was in college in New York, and a friend called to give me the news. I knew that I needed to go home to Michigan for the funeral to believe that it had really happened.

The core of this paper is a reading of Robert Browning's “Clive” (1880); it attempts to account for the formalist demands of this generically complex and relentlessly ironic poetic text, while at the same time it construes the accomplishment of Browning's poetic language and form as intricate cultural critique. However, in order to better understand Browning's poem an additional discussion of its intertexts is required, the most important being Thomas Babington Macaulay's essay “On Clive” (1840).