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This paper analyzes the history, membership, and rules of the Heath Book Club operating near Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the 1850s in order to gain insight into the lives of readers during the Victorian period. Members included several wealthy landowners, clergymen, and other prominent residents, as well as a few professionals and one tradesman. As members of a book club, readers had access to otherwise hard-to-attain books. As a social network, the book club may have provided additional economic, social, or political returns to the members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses George Henry Lewes's study of living matter in The Physiology of Common Life (1859-60). Despite the physiological materiality of its subject, Lewes's text often discusses states of life that defy clear-cut classification. The process of human aging is a particularly confounding example of life and death's indeterminacy because, as Lewes describes, older age invokes both the physiological and aesthetic intermingling of animal life with stone, petrifaction, and minerality. I argue that Lewes's discussion of aging in Chapter XIII draws directly from the earlier geological research of Charles Lyell and, with brief reference to illustrative examples elsewhere in Victorian writing, I show the ways in which the Lewesian understanding of aging as a state of suspension between animality and minerality is reliant upon and a spur for the nineteenth-century literary imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses three articles in this special issue arising from the 14th annual November 2016 conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association entitled "Social Victorians" in Phoenix, Arizona, on topics including art galleries, a provincial book club, and reviews of ballads.

This essay responds to current scholarship as it explains the poor person's horror of dissection in the Victorian period as part of a long and complex process of deprivation. Working with the Anatomy Act (1832) and the New Poor Law (1834) as its backdrop, this essay examines three anxieties that were inseparable from the pauper's existence: the social embarrassment attendant on the loss of personal belongings, especially clothes; the humiliation forced upon workhouse inmates by the New Poor Law diet; and the existential foreboding triggered by the prospect of postmortem dissection. It culminates in a consideration of the early works of Charles Dickens, who found in fiction a set of strategies that allowed early Victorians simultaneously to register and to compensate for these anxieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the Kelmscott editions of William Morris's late prose romances in reference to late-nineteenth-century typographical discourses. It identifies on the surface of the Kelmscott works a previously undisclosed record of print craftsmanship: a coordinated effort by Morris and his print workers to prevent textually encoded forms of distraction from accruing on the printed page. In so doing, it engages with past scholarship that has traced the politics of the Kelmscott book to its utopian methods of print production or to its idealized, textually implicit modes of aesthetic perception. Offering a new way of appreciating this politics, it considers the books' coordinated efforts to eliminate distractions as an organized resistance to the misguided technoprogressive logic informing modern print practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay calls attention to the philosophical parallels between British aestheticism--the "art for art's sake" movement founded by Walter Pater in the late 1860s--and a contemporary strain of optimistic evolutionism popularized by iconoclastic mathematician W. K. Clifford in the 1870s. Although evolutionism and aestheticism appear unrelated at first glance, Clifford's and Pater's bodies of work reveal common concerns about the influence of scientific materialism on culture and the place of the individual within the evolutionary process. By tracing these commonalities through the work of Clifford, Pater, and aesthetic poet Mathilde Blind, this essay posits a richer account of the interdependent formation of both aesthetic and evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to three essays published within this issue: "Surround, Background, and the Overlooked," by Kate Flint; "Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait," by Rachel Teukolsky; and "Champagne in the Shrubbery: Sex, Science, and Space in James Tissot's London Conservatory," by Samantha Burton. Topics include late-nineteenth century visual culture, the use of foreground and backgrounds in art and photography, and technological innovations and popular culture.

"Sensation" in the early 1860s was more than just a series of scandalous novels. Critics hurled the insult at any object that courted novelty, from mouthwash to photographs. This essay examines an aspect of sensation's visual culture in "cartomania," the craze for cartes-de-visite that inspired the creation and collection of millions of small photographic portraits. The carte introduced a new kind of celebrity, one based on image, notoriety, and a fleeting kind of fame familiar to us from today's tabloid culture. The greatest sensations were generated by cartes of questionable women--actresses, courtesans, and female criminals. Like the sensation novel, the carte upended traditional divides of class and gender by foregrounding powerful women of dubious backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]