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Unlike architecture, music is mostly a marginal or infrequent aspect of utopian literature, though usually invested with solely positive connotations. It is however particularly prominent in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon but it is only described negatively, as unpleasant, discordant and even cacophonous. This is where Butler’s radical originality lies: firstly in this diversion of the laudatory, spiritualized conception of music and of its utopian associations; and secondly in the (re)appropriation of music for satiric and anti-utopian purposes. After a brief survey of the usual role and connotations of music in utopias, this paper will focus on its value and symbolism before the narrator’s stay in Erewhon. It will then address its representation in the unknown land that collapses the literal (acoustic) and social meanings of discordance with unpleasant or cacophonous music as the index to a dysfunctional world and its ethical flaws. Lastly, the article will deal with the narrator’s unstable stance and views, which, together with the generic and tonal hybridity of the text and its ironic logic, alternating between satire and (anti)utopia, make the novel go through a series of perplexing ideological fluctuations. Like the cacophonous music of Erewhon, the message conveyed is ultimately ambiguous and at times discordant.

Despite their growing importance in Victorian society, machines are underrepresented in ‘industrial’ or ‘social problem’ fiction. H. G. Wells’s short stories and novellas of the 1890s are a notable exception. While ‘The Cone’ is indebted to the mid-Victorian (cautionary) tradition and especially to Dickens’s Hard Times, these features are inflected in an innovative and pioneering way mainly due to the text’s unprecedented generic hybridity. The industrial sublime coexists with a generalized sense of melancholy, shown as the new social disease affecting middle-class characters—and no longer the working-class underdogs or ‘Hands’ of previous texts—in a disfigured world deserted by God. ‘The Cone’ could be called an ‘industrial romance’, a category subsuming its genera mixta status: its convincing, realistic substratum (the industrial world of the 1890s in the Newcastle area), its love (and revenge) plot within an industrial context, the presence of dark Biblical symbolism within the realistic mode, and an approach to the human psyche inspired from contemporary psychological research and formulated through the uncanny. The realistic descriptive regime is inflected by a fantastic form of poetics fostered by complex images of repression and voracious orality whereby the figurations of the industrial setting and its omnipresent machinery serve as indirect psychological expressions, both of the unknown depths of an individual’s psyche (Horrocks’s) and of a large-scale collective crisis, so that machinery also turns out to be the tragic paradigm of late Victorian industrial society.

This paper will examine the meaning and modalities of travelling and « the horizon » in five ghost stories from M. R. James’s 1904 collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary featuring erudite Englishmen, most of whom Oxbridge academics and researchers, specialising in archaeology or history. These prim and fussy bachelors embark on their scholarly field studies in a very buoyant mood, hoping to make key discoveries in situ although the prospect of travelling somewhat disturbs them, the more so as four out of five of them have to go abroad and stay at foreign inns or hotels... As a matter of fact, James perpetuates the period Gothic tradition whereby foreign countries — and more especially « Papist » ones — symbolise danger and threat. Moreover, as could be expected in ghost stories, in which anxiety and terror are prerequisites of the genre, the characters’ journeys will not have gratifying intellectual results but will be traumatic and lead to unpalatable intimate discoveries. All five characters experience something terrifying, descend into literal and metaphoric depths, and one of them even meets his death because of it. But ironically, even if the things or creatures that menace them initially seem alien to them, they turn out to be part of them, as in Freud’s uncanny.

With George Cruikshank’s famous engraving London Going out of Town. The March of Bricks and Mortar (1829), that gives a nightmare, fantastic image of the ravages of urbanization, we can notice the innovative resort to the Gothic to deal with modern phenomena, something as yet unprecedented in the arts, and a device that will also be used by Dickens in the 1850s and 60s to evoke the railway. However, this recourse to the Gothic represents a paradox as the Gothic is supposed to belong to the dark, distant, uncivilized medieval past and it is here used to describe the new living conditions of the industrial era, and the growth of technology. Somehow, it seems logical to resort to the linguistic and symbolic tools of the uncanny to represent new, unknown and destabilizing realities, as in « The Signal-Man ». But what appears more surprising and paradoxical is the use of archaic elements, such as myth, and teratological images—as in Dombey and Son—to depict modernity. The reason may lie in the fact that trains or factories, belching fumes and staining everything about them, were seen as dangerous, all-powerful, voracious monsters and that writers were powerless in front of such disturbing, unprecedented phenomena and had to fall back on familiar, reassuring narrative techniques to come to terms with them. Describing new facts of life with old tools—this is the central paradox and the essential originality of Dickens’s fiction on the railway.

The 19th century city, in real life and fiction alike, concentrated and crystallized society’s most deep-seated fears and became a favourite locale for anxiety and anguish. The City of Dreadful Night (1874) by James Thomson (1834-1882) obviously belongs to the literary tradition of the « dark city » which spans the whole century, from Blake and De Quincey on. Thomson’s nameless but emblematic « city », as the definite article in the title shows, gathers many tropes already featured in previous texts—the labyrinth, darkness and gloom, the figure of the wanderer. It then forms a literary, pictorial and autobiographical palimpsest, under the aegis of Dürer’s Melencolia (1514). However, the poem conjures up a distorted and hallucinated image of London and Thomson’s atheism and pessimism—quite akin to Schopenhauer’s—make his nightmarish and crepuscular « city » stand out against the mainstream. Although its form is largely indebted to 19th century poetic codes, the mood of The City surprisingly pre-dates the 20th century sense of the tragic and the absurd. One of the epigraphs is drawn from Dante’s Inferno, but in the poem, hell has nothing to do with the punishment the damned undergo in the world beyond. It is actually the lot of the living, doomed to endless wandering, without any hope of a better hereafter. Thomson’s city, contaminated by a mysterious disease, haunted by fear, is a self-enclosed, solipsistic, meaningless world, a world without God or ideals. It offers a despairing allegory of the « hell of modernity ». And in this doomed world, the most frightening thing is not so much death as life...

Excess is omnipresent in Wilkie Collins’s novels, but this paper will focus on Basil (1852), No Name (1862), The Moonstone (1868), Man and Wife (1870) and The Law and The Lady (1875). Actually, the modes and manifestations of excess cannot be limited to extrovert behaviour, unbridled passions, and all types of gothic violence. In these works, some of the reserved and unobtrusive female characters that embody excess « err » on the side of introversion, retreat into silence and illness and become almost « invisible ». This policy of self-censorship, and excessive somatization, gives a symptomatic function to excess as a revelator of social pathologies (unfair patriarchal laws) and family disorders — repressive and unhealthy marital situations and all forms of abuse inflicted on wives. All these variations on the gothic pattern of persecution enacted in « the secret theatre of home » serve to expose and denounce social and family diseases.Physical and mental disease is of course a central concern for two major male (though sexually ambiguous) Collinsian figures, namely Ezra Jennings in The Moonstone—an opium (ab)user like Thomas De Quincey (a strong influence in the novel) and like Collins himself—and Miserrimus Dexter (associated with a Romantic intertext of excess) in The Law and The Lady. Paradoxically, the resolution of both (detective) novels, the return to order and normality are finally achieved thanks to Jennings (a sick and ostracized doctor) and Dexter (a crippled amateur artist threatened with incurable madness). Both men are ill, marginal, stand for eccentricity and excess, and occasionally act as Collins’s mouthpieces, too.The writer’s ironic and subversive use of these characters to promote « happy endings » may therefore be regarded as another kind of excess.