FINALLY PASSED IN 1847, the Ten Hours Bill restricted the number of hours worked by women and children in the factories to ten per day. Its enactment was the result of a lengthy political crusade whose chief parliamentary spokesman had been the Tory M.P., Lord Ashley. A decade later, in his two-volume History of the Factory Movement, Samuel Kydd (or “Alfred”) made a cursory, half-sentence reference to the “useful” contribution made to the campaign by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood (295).Tonna's dates are 1790–1846. Appearing as a novel in 1841, Helen Fleetwood was first serialised between September 1839 and March 1841 in the Christian Lady's Magazine (edited by Tonna 1834 to 1846). Written to persuade her female readership of the urgent need for a Ten Hours Bill, the novel depicts the devastating spiritual and physical consequences of factory work on the eponymous heroine and her adopted family. While Kydd acknowledges Tonna's contribution, the brevity of his remark suggests that her status in the Ten Hours Movement was, at most, ancillary. Kydd seems unaware of the articles about the Ten Hours Bill that Tonna wrote in her magazine. Nor does he refer to her work of 1843, “The Forsaken Home,” which portrays the calamitous domestic consequences of the long hours worked by factory women.This is all the more surprising when one considers Kydd's friendship with the Movement's extra-parliamentary leader, Richard Oastler (Driver 518). “The Forsaken Home” is the second of four stories by Tonna, each published as a separate book under the collective title The Wrongs of Woman (1843–44). The stories were published in the following order: “Milliners and Dress-Makers” (1843); “The Forsaken Home” (1843); “The Little Pin-Headers” (1843); “The Lace-Runners” (1844). Although Tonna continues to be critically obscure, recent literary historians have registered the full range of her writing on the Ten Hours Movement.It is important to acknowledge the work of literary historians such as Fryckstedt, Kestner, Kovacevic, Kanner and (in particular) Neff, which first began the process of raising Tonna's critical profile. Nonetheless, they have perpetuated Kydd's perception of her minor role by persistently characterizing her as meekly following where Ashley led. Wanda Fraiken Neff, for example, depicts Tonna as his “faithful” supporter, someone who “reflected his views” (35, 68). Similarly, Joseph Kestner describes her as having merely “accepted Ashley's fervid word” (93).

EVENBEFORE ESTHER LYON enters the narrative of Felix Holt, she is introduced to the eponymous hero, whom she will eventually marry, through two smells — one present, the other absent; one highly conventional, the other distinctly unusual. As the narrator explains, Mr. Lyon’s sitting room contains “certain things” that are “incongruous” with its “general air” of “privation,” among them the “delicate scent of dried rose-leaves” and a wax candle. Lyon, embarrassed by what he takes to be Felix Holt’s unspoken criticism of such indulgence, explains to his visitor, “You are doubtless amazed to see me with a wax-light . . . but this undue luxury is paid for with the earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her” (Eliot 53–54; ch. 5).1 Esther’s association with the scent of roses is quite unremarkable: it simply and quickly registers her as a wholly acceptable marriage partner. Lyon’s reference to the smell of tallow candles is, however, according to the practices of Victorian fiction, quite unconventional, first because it explicitly evokes a smell that is not there, the strong odor of candles made from animal fat; secondly, because it identifies a good smell or the relative lack of one, that of wax candles, with a negative moral judgment: Esther’s practice of spending her earnings on such candles is, to Lyon at least,

… a great difference of opinion has prevailed among the moderns concerning what the ancients intended by the lotus: for the history of it, as it has come down to us, is mixed with fable, from having previously passed through the hands of the poets.

The name ‘lotus’ was applied by the ancients indifferently to a number of quite different families of plants, notably (1) the true lotus … (2) the shrub or tree Zizyphus, Jujuba, whose berries were eaten by tribes in North Africa (3) trefoils, clovers, and melilots. … The lotus which men really ate was what I have called the true lotus, of which there are two varieties to be considered: (1) Nelumbo, the Indian lotus, and (2) Nymphaea, the Egyptian lotus, both of the family Nymphaeaceae.

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wilde's writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.

In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), multiple discursive strategies contend with the difficulty of determining racial identity. My aim here is not to delineate a straightforward or unambiguous racial discourse in the novel but rather to clarify the usefulness of ambiguity to the narrative's racialism. If, as Ann Laura Stoler has argued, racism in the nineteenth century depended on flexible rather than fixed criteria, Brontë's novel allows for the study of such criteria and of the discursive displacements that assign them to diverse human qualities.

Across the span of a single decade, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins published, respectively, a poem and two novels with similarly innovative structures. All three works are multiple narratives; that is, they are narrated by several of their characters who function both as actors and witnesses. All three were immediately popular, and all three continue to be regarded as major achievements of their audiors. The Woman in White, serialized in All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860, quickly became the talk of London and remained so preeminent among Collins's novels that in his will he requested as his epitaph, “author of The Woman in White and other works of fiction.” The Ring and the Book, begun in 1864 and inspired by a source that Browning found in 1860, was issued in four volumes, two in 1868 and two in 1869. Like The Woman in White, it was widely discussed and admired, exalting Browning's reputation even among readers who had earlier been critical. The Moonstone, begun in 1867 and published serially in All the Year Round during 1868, was not initially as popular as the other two, although its publisher reported that “crowds of anxious readers” waited for the latest serial installments; but today it is Collins's most celebrated novel, often (though inaccurately) cited as the first detective novel in English.

TWO CARNIVALESQUE EVENTS are referred to in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. One is used as an example in a discussion of political expediency: the Archbishop of Naples is said to have sanctioned, in what would now be called a populist gesture, the St. Januarius procession against the plague (1993, 384; bk. 4, ch. 33). The other is embedded in a simile: the attitude of the British mainstream society to Jews is compared with the attitude of the matrons of Delphi to the tired Maenads who had wandered into their city: the matrons “tenderly” minister to the Bacchae and take them “safely to their own borders” (195; bk. 2, ch. 17).

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, a governess was the primary educator of male and female children in a middle-class household; particularly by virtue of her work educating girls through their mid-teens, the governess simultaneously effected and disrupted the transparent transmission of class and gender identity between generations of middle-class women. Recent scholarship has de-emphasized this pedagogical function in its readings of the figure.1 Discussion has centered, instead, on the ways in which the governess represented a crisis for early Victorian definitions of bourgeois femininity (which centered on middle-class women’s financial dependence and apparent leisure) because she was a middle-class woman who earned her own living. But to read the figure of the Victorian governess through Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is to see that she troubled bourgeois hegemony because of her job. I contend that the governess disturbed the early Victorians not only because she blurred the boundary between the separate spheres, but also because she dramatized the potentially illimitable effects of education. When you hire someone to teach your children, how do you ensure that she is teaching what you wish and as you wish?

On the occasion of her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria was depicted in a woodcut by William Nicholson that was to become extremely popular (Figure 1). So stout that her proportions approach those of a cube, the Queen is dressed from top to toe in her usual black mourning attire, the white of her gloved hands punctuating the otherwise nearly solid black rectangle of her body. Less than thirty years later, another simple image of a woman in black would prove to be equally iconic: the lithe, narrow column of Chanel's black dress (Figure 2). Comparing the dresses depicted in the two images – the first a visual reminder of the desexualized stolidity of Victorian fidelity, the second image an example of women's burgeoning social and sexual liberation – might lead one to conclude that the only thing they have in common is the color black. And yet, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fashion historians suggest that Victorian mourning is the direct antecedent of the sexier fashions that followed. Jill Fields writes, for example, that “the move to vamp black became possible because the growing presence of black outerwear for women in the nineteenth century due to extensive mourning rituals merged with the growing sensibility that dressing in black was fashionable” (144). Valerie Mendes is more direct: “Traditional mourning attire blazed a trail for the march of fashionable black and the little black dress” (9). These are provocative claims given that most scholarly accounts of Victorian mourning attire – whether from the perspective of literary analysis, fashion history or theory, or social history or theory – offer no indication that such progressive possibilities were inherent in widows’ weeds. Instead, those accounts focus almost exclusively on chasteness and piety, qualities required of the sorrowful widow, as the only message communicated by her attire: “Widows’ mourning clothes announced the ongoing bonds of fidelity, dependence, and grieving that were expected to tie women to their dead husbands for at least a year” (Bradbury 289). The disparity in the two accounts raises the question: how could staid, cumbersome black Victorian mourning attire lead to dresses understood to embrace sexuality and mobility?

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit (1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense in Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century (2010), where John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

I think I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.

* * *

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

— Hardy, “In Tenebris II,” Poems of the Past and the Present

CRITICS HAVE TOO OFTEN dismissed the Gothic elements in Thomas Hardy’s writings as superficial trappings to be found mostly in his minor fiction.1 The aim of this article is to show that the diffusion of Gothic motifs in the whole of Hardy’s literary production is something both intentional and fruitful. The Gothic is indeed a vital part of Hardy’s artistic vision, and it adds to the aesthetic value of his works. His major novels and his poetry are as rife with Gothic lore as his early “minor” fiction.2 This propagation of Gothic elements is central to the dialectic between impregnation and dispersal contained in the etymology of the word “dissemination” (meaning both “sowing” and “scattering”).3

This article explores the representation of “plant horror” in fin de siècle “lost world” novels, from hideously dynamic carnivorous trees to mysterious plant-based drugs with the power to send their victims into torpid apathy. Such freakish flora can contribute to new understandings of the imperial romance novel, specifically in relation to its depiction of threatened masculinities. Combining modern ecocritical research into plant horror with readings of the imperial gothic, this article sheds new light on both fields by challenging the common assumption that both genres often associate the uncanny with moments of accelerated violence. Rather, I argue that these texts are instead most interested in questions of lassitude and stasis, and in problematizing the ideologies of conquest and control that animated British imperialism. Nuancing the ecophobia that is often identified with moments of plant horror, this article interprets nature not as phobic object but as sublimated metaphor for a specifically gendered anxiety. Encounters with the monstrous vegetal serve as an unsettling reminder that male bodies were ultimately disposable, controllable, and replaceable within the flawed economies of Victorian imperialism.

In the penultimate book ofDaniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth appears in a state of physical and mental shock after the drowning of her detested husband. Exposed to an increasingly popularized discourse of trauma, today's readers would have little trouble in identifying and labeling Gwendolen as a traumatized subject, suffering from a variety of typical symptoms in the aftermath of her terrible experience. She is fixated on the “dead face” of Grandcourt in the water, hallucinating it everywhere. Later, she complains that she “can't sleep much” and that “[t]hings repeat themselves in me so. They come back – they will all come back” (659; ch. 65). Disoriented in the present, she seems to return repeatedly to the past, the line between her interior world and the external world growing increasingly tenuous: “She unconsciously left intervals in her retrospect, not clearly distinguishing between what she said, and what she had only an inward vision of” (594; ch. 56). In her conversation with Daniel Deronda, she is described as being silent for a moment or two, “as if her memory had lost itself in a web where each mesh drew all the rest” (592; ch. 56). Deronda wonders whether she “was she seeing the whole event – her own acts included – through an exaggerating medium of excitement and horror.” (591; ch. 56).

AFTER MINA HARKER awakens from Count Dracula's vampiric embrace, she asks the men around her, but more pointedly herself, “What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days?” (285, ch. 21). As she recounts this perverse seduction in her own words, however, she contradicts her earlier disavowal: “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (284). These conflicting statements capture the peculiar double bind with which Mina struggles throughout Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Many critics concentrate on Dracula himself and the men who do battle with him; interestingly, the novel also develops Mina's complex subjectivity through her unspoken but deep affinity with the vampire. Van Helsing's paranoid observation, “Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina, is changing” (319; ch. 24), epitomizes shifting cultural anxieties at the moment when a long-standing ideological conception of proper femininity comes under suspicious attack. Although nothing seems more natural to Mina than her desire to help her husband in the public sphere while maintaining an intimate friendship with Lucy Westenra in the private, these familiar roles become estranged by the new taxonomies of deviancy popularized during the late nineteenth century.

QUESTIONSABOUT THE PERFORMATIVE NATURE of Victorian culture have received extended attention in the past decade or so as critics have begun to examine the relationship between representation and subjectivity.1 By and large, such studies have fruitfully problematized our received assumptions about the private character of the Victorians. At the same time, however, they have also implicitly privileged the middle-class frames of reference that shape the distinction, for even as they complicate our understanding of performance by calling into question the distinction between public and private modes, critics who take up such issues tend not to question the stability of the categories of experience under scrutiny. As a result, while we gain important new insights into the cultural formation of identity or genre underwritten by the separation of public and private spheres, we also risk reading all Victorians as if their relationships to such ideological formations were identical with those of the emerging middle class.

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

I Cor. 15.54

IN MID-CENTURY LONDON there occurred a spectacle of massive proportions, featuring always at its center a corpse. The funeral of the Duke of Wellington, an event that has occasioned surprisingly little critical attention, took place in 1852 and was recognized as one of the greatest public displays of the Victorian period.1 Indeed, many felt it to be one of the most significant public events in the history of Britain, and if Britain, then of course the globe: as the Illustrated London News put it, “[this event] may be said to have surpassed in significant grandeur any similar tribute to greatness ever offered in the world” (Nov. 20, 1852, 430).2 St. Paul’s Cathedral was specially illuminated with six thousand new gas lights in preparation for the ceremony of interment, while the funeral procession, comprised of more than ten thousand marchers, encompassed central London, enjoying an audience numbering more than one and a half million people. Queen Victoria and virtually every major and minor national figure in politics or the arts viewed either the procession or the ceremony at St. Paul’s. The interment was quite literally a multi-media event: the spectacle drew for its effects on numerous disciplines, from literature, music, and journalism to painting, drawing, and architectural design, and spawned in turn editorials, songs, poems, paintings, prints, and engravings.

AT THE END OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’SLady Audley’s Secret (1862), her hero- detective Robert Audley marries the near-identical sister of George Talboys, his one close friend since their days at Eton College years before. Throughout the novel, Braddon characterizes Robert as having effeminate mannerisms and a strong longing to be with George. She consciously makes him an alumnus of Eton College, which one contemporary critic cited as a prime example of “characteristic faults and virtues” of the entire public school system (Payne 35). One perceived “fault” of the public schools in particular was that homosexuality and homoeroticism were condoned among the boys, who were later expected to “become” heterosexual upon graduation. But Robert’s homoerotic urges do not disappear with his “purchase” of a heterosexual marriage at the novel’s end.