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Eight scholars of Victorian literature reflect on George Eliot’s Middlemarch in honor of the 150th anniversary of its publication. The authors offer their personal responses to the novel, and each has a unique focus: insights into the lesser known characters who contribute essential strands to the rich fabric of the text, reflections on friendships within and beyond the novel, analysis of the complexities of characters’ thought processes, a letter to Mr. Casaubon and a comparison between reading the novel as a rushed graduate student and later as a more seasoned scholar, a reflection on how Middlemarch is NOT Jane Eyre and a belated appreciation of its humor, an analysis of the novel in context of a “world historical energy transition” and the current climate crisis, musings on reading Middlemarch for the first time while also teaching for the first time, and finally a defense of the character of Rosamond.

Walter Pater's writings advance an affective historicism: an embodied experience of the past that Pater conceived in dialogue with Victorian neuroscience. Pater theorized art's freedom from the present by drawing on insights into reaction time, the subject of influential scientific studies in nineteenth-century culture. His slow-moving prose lifts readers out of the now, while simultaneously binding them to material realities. These tendencies fueled charges of sexual deviance againstThe Renaissance(1873) insofar as medical and religious writers understood belated reactions as a symptom of effeminate ennui. But inMarius the Epicurean(1885), Pater reinscribes religious sentiments in terms of postponement. Its hero's sensory education, set in late classical culture, aligns the feeling of postponement with nascent doctrines of resurrection and temporal returns. After elaborating this account, the essay revises Georg Lukács's observations on weak secular heroes, extending queer scholarship to show how, through the feltness of the past, Pater's hero learns to resist incorporation into modern social forms.

This article advances a fresh understanding of the ethics and aesthetics that defined George Eliot's fictional maturity, particularly in light of Eliot's fascination with energy science. Victorian scientists discovered that the energy of the world was ineluctably lost or “diffused,” never again to perform productive work. But many mid-Victorians saw diffusion in optimistic terms, in contrast to more disconsolate perspectives at the century's close. In Middlemarch (1873-74), I argue, Eliot utilized the theory of energy diffusion as a model of eternal fulfillment. She did so in two ways. First, energy science provided a heuristic for Eliot's sympathetic vision. While her protagonists reflect the breakdown of interpersonal bonds—the impossibility of any perfect recognition of another's pain—the novel deploys the terms and tropes of diffusion to suggest sympathy's post-subjective effects in the lives of others. Second, I submit that energy science shaped Eliot's distinctive understanding of the novel itself as a mode of cultural production. Through figurations of unproductive energy, Eliot came to imagine how wasteful, prodigal acts of reading could bring about an ethically revitalized world. Energy science thus enabled Eliot to reconcile conventional claims about the social purpose of the novel with incipiently Arnoldian canons of art's autonomy from politics. By reading Eliot's work alongside the work of contemporary scientists, I disclose a radical ideal of literature's unproductive powers, one that linked new ideologies of formal appreciation with the novel's longstanding social promise.

This article traces the complex interconnections between new, neurological concepts of sensory lag and the formal and conceptual concerns of sensation novels in the mid-Victorian period. Concepts of sensory delay developed when scientists first measured the velocity of the nerves in 1850, a startling breakthrough that revealed an interval between physical stimuli and their resolution in consciousness. But while scientific popularizers emphasized the morbid, even emasculating effects of sensory delay, I show how novelists such as Wilkie Collins would insist upon its more positive potentials. In Armadale (1866), Collins conceived an alternative masculinity defined by nervous irresolution rather than rational action--a strategy that was wedded deeply to Collins' ideas about both popular fiction and about the developing vocation of the professional male novelist.