Search

This chapter examines the image of the Indian put across by William Cody in his Wild West Show. The ethos and implications of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show have recently received a good deal of thoughtful academic attention. But understanding the ways in which Buffalo Bill's show was received in Britain, not just in 1887 but on its subsequent visits, involves exploring not only what British spectators might be encouraged to internalize about the American-ness from the shows themselves, but also what is revealed about perceptions of British national identity from their reception. The chapter then looks at the resonances that the Wild West could be made to have for a number of domestic concerns—about mass culture, about gender, and, above all, about Britain's position as a world power. What, however, may we learn of the responses of the Wild West Indians themselves to their experiences? Frustratingly, not as much as one would hope. If the Show Indians were angry about their treatment—whether at the hands of Buffalo Bill or the American government back home—there is no prominent record of it.

This chapter assesses how attitudes started to shift at the beginning of the twentieth century—partly under the influence of Western movies, partly as modernist writers and artists started to idealize the Indian for their own ends, and as other wannabe Indians, most notably Grey Owl, began to develop the association of Indianness with environmental preservation. It also looks at some contemporary writing by native peoples—especially James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko—that aims to reappropriate nineteenth-century transatlantic history in a range of imaginative ways. By writing this fiction today, both Silko and Welch reclaim and rewrite the possibilities inherent for native peoples in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, they demonstrate that despite the importance, then and now, of tradition as both concept and practice within Indian society, identity, and modes of thought, it stands not isolated from modernity, but rather in mediation and dialogue with it. At a time when critical attention within American studies has increasingly turned toward imperialism and transnationalism, to explore the importance of the transatlantic Indian is to provide an important reminder that the internal colonial relations of the United States cannot be separated from these other trajectories.

This chapter explores British popular writing. It considers some of the means by which stereotypes of Indians that emanated from the United States circulated within Britain and were modified and filtered through domestic concerns. The chapter first assesses the influence that James Fenimore Cooper had on transatlantic adventure and historical fiction, and then pass to Charles Dickens's often contradictory treatments of native peoples, before looking at the more complicated case of Mayne Reid. This British writer of popular Westerns employed contemporary American-generated stereotypes of Indians and at times reinforced that country's message of manifest destiny, yet he also managed to question certain political and racial aspects of American life in a way that offered up a warning to his home readership. These stereotypes are read through a consideration of the shifting nuances of the idea of the “savage” in mid-Victorian Britain.

This chapter assesses the portrayal of Native Americans by British women writers. This treatment was often far more radical, and far more angry—whether focusing on racial issues or on imperial ambitions in general—than that found in the work of many male authors. Until the midcentury at least, the cultural work performed by those women writers who took Indians as their subject oscillated between mourning their imminent and inevitable demise and protesting against the specific political and racist attitudes that lay behind their treatment in America. After the middle of the century, although women's appropriation of the figure of the Indian occurred less frequently within serious imaginative writing, those poets who engaged with these native peoples showed an increasing tendency to extrapolate from the American context and turn their humanitarian gaze toward the workings of the British Empire itself. Women seem to have been particularly drawn to Indians as a poetic topic, both finding them a suitable object on which to expend the fashionable literary currency of sentimental compassion and, it has been argued, seeing them, in their apparent disempowerment and marginalization, as an analogue for their own condition as women.

This chapter looks at the image of the Indian that the nineteenth century inherited from Romantic writing, one that emphasized the trope of the “dying Indian” as a member of a race associated with positive connotations of bravery, loyalty, dignity, and so on. It shows how it provided an opportunity for poets to exploit their fondness for the melancholic or to explore the qualities of supposedly primitive people. The chapter then traces the shift from the way in which the Indian was seen as a vehicle of rhetorical eloquence to being a figure of pathos. How did this transition come about? The answer lies in a combination of factors. Taken together, these illustrate the interdependency of poetic traditions on either side of the Atlantic during this period and the adaptability of the idea of the dying Indian to serve a range of aesthetic, political, and emotional ends. In both Britain and the United States, there was a growing and increasingly compassionately expressed knowledge about what was happening to native peoples. Indians in North America, however numerous they might appear to those who still saw them as formidable military allies or opponents, were becoming increasingly vulnerable: not just to diseases, but to displacement.

This chapter examines the impact made by the Ojibwa and Iowa Indians who toured with George Catlin in the 1840s—and the impression that their travels in Britain made upon them. Both groups performed dances and uttered “the dreadful war-whoop,” and both groups were, effectively, live exhibits, introduced and explained in lectures and in the question-and-answer sessions Catlin held. How did these Indians interpret England? The evidence is somewhat limited, since it must come largely from Catlin's words, in the book he published about his years in England and Europe. In conveying Indian voices, Catlin invariably makes them sound as though they think and express themselves in a simpler, more “innocent” way than the—by implication—more sophisticated product of Western civilization. A native perspective on 1840s Britain is provided by the Ojibwa Maungwudaus. Throughout his account, individual experience gains its importance not through subjective response but as something that may be shared through terms designed to reach a specific readership or audience, with its own familiar frames of reference. Native peoples are not the Other against which modernity is being postulated; rather, the modern world is being presented for them.

This article explores what it means to write a cultural history of the flash gun, the apparatus used to explode flash powder between the late nineteenth and the mid twentieth centuries. Finding saf...

Cultural histories of nineteenth-century Britain have studied the important physical and psychological transformations caused by the industrialization of light. Gaslight, though discovered prior to the nineteenth century, became aligned with the era’s narratives of national and industrial progress, an arc that, one might argue, culminated in the growing popularity of electric light at the end of the century. Yet, despite these new technologies of ‘artificial light’, ‘natural’ wood and coal fires remained popular in British culture. This issue explores fire as a visual and narrative technology in art, literature, and public displays by examining the ways in which it evoked competing symbolic values, such as primitivism and modernity, vitality and destruction, intimacy and spectacle. The reading order mixes articles and shorter pieces together to demonstrate the continuities of fire across various sites, including: the domestic fireside, the tallow candle, theatrical conflagrations, Turner’s fires, fireworks, funeral pyres, subterranean fire, solar fire, and a coal-ship fire.

John Millais’s Autumn Leaves (1856) has long been recognized as a painting that sets out to produce certain feelings in the spectator — feelings that are usually identified as very abstract ones of melancholy and loss. As such, it tends to be read either alongside contemporary poetry that seeks to evoke a similar response, or as a forerunner of the aesthetic turn of the 1860s. I examine first some of the general questions that surround the production of feeling and affect in relation to nineteenth-century painting, and argue for the importance of understanding aesthetically generated feeling in the context of the available vocabulary — both verbal and artistic — of its time. I acknowledge the importance of critical interpretations of Autumn Leaves that have been generated over the last couple of decades (especially in the work of Malcolm Warner, Jason Rosenfeld, and David Peters Corbett), and explore the grounds on which they are based. I expand the grounds on which we might consider this a work that depicts transience and transition, and that is, itself, stylistically transitional. But I consider it in a new light by reading it alongside other visual material that depicts the Crimean War, including paintings by Millais himself, John Dalbiac Luard, and Noel Paton; and I put it alongside contemporary photographs, especially those by James Fenton, which Luard drew to Millais’s attention. I also explore the importance of Autumn Leaves being painted in the Scottish town of Perth, which had many men involved in Crimean warfare. With a glance at Andrew Wyeth’s work, I look at the tension between explicit and implicit subject matter when it comes to representing feelings generated by the devastation of war, and argue that the melancholy evoked by Autumn Leaves may have its origins, at least in part, in the very specific circumstances in which it was not only painted, but in which it would initially have been viewed. By extension, this article is an argument for the necessity of understanding the historic specificity of feeling.

This chapter considers how different types of photography—artistic, instrumental, and vernacular—were practised during the period, and the implications of literary references to this increasingly common practice. It discusses comparisons between photography and other arts, especially poetry. Photography, it shows, was considered both as evidentiary and indexical, and also as unreliable and open to fakery. The different uses and associations of the medium, within and outside literature, therefore raised questions of authenticity, reliability, veracity, and gullibility. The chapter explores the role of the photograph in celebrity culture and literary tourism, and its illustrative properties. Through the example of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s illustrations to Henry James’s Venetian stories, it shows that it may function as an interpretive supplement to a text. Finally, photography’s relationship to modernism is discussed, both through the challenges of art photography, and through the genre’s capacity to call attention to the qualities of ordinary life.

This essay considers the actual and metaphorical power of the lightning's flash. As a natural phenomenon repeatedly described by Romantic writers, its startling, sudden illumination was repeatedly invoked by the pioneers of flash photography who looked to find suitable language in which to convey their new-found power to light up darkness. The sun already provided a vocabulary in which to describe daytime picture-taking; the associations with awe, danger, revelation and grandeur that lightning provided were readily adopted by such practitioners as Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, inventors in 1887 of “Blitzlichtpulver,” or “lightning light powder.” But as I show through a close examination of nineteenth-century flash photographs, especially those of Jacob Riis, the characteristics of this medium are significantly dissimilar to the effects of lightning. This technology of visibility produced light that dazzled and lit up surfaces, rather than providing illumination in any deeper sense. Its literature lo...

In this response piece, I consider the variety of ways in which reading may be said to work upon a reader, and I bring out the importance of the idea of affect in this respect. I note that affect is frequently conceived of in a positive light, and my argument shifts to ask what happens if the reader is bored, puzzled, disgusted, irritated, or otherwise disengaged. Using Patricia Meyer Spacks's Boredom and Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings as critical works to support my case, I suggest that we should pay more attention to the ways in which reading may confuse or alienate us, and I maintain that these negative affects are ones of particular importance when we consider the global reach of the novel. How might we understand and negotiate what I term “unsatisfactory reading,” especially if it is provoked through the unfamiliarity of literary or social convention?

When I was a teenager, and starting to read hungrily and eclectically, I was plagued by a recurring dream. I'd go into a dusty second-hand bookstore, crammed with disorganized volumes that were spilling off the shelves, piled in heaps on the floor. I'd pick one up and find an (imaginary) George Eliot novel, or a daring fin-de-siecle narrative, or a complicated mid-Victorian saga full of family tensions. And then, before I could decide quite which I cotild afford to buy, or locate my purse, or gather them all up in my arms, it would be closing time in the bookstore, and I'd be hustled out, waking up unspeakably frustrated at not being able to remember the names of all these elusive, promising texts and writers. Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own appeared in 1977, my first full year as a graduate student. To open it was to walk into my fantasy bookstore only this time, the titles and the authors were for real. Reading it again, it's important to recollect the emotions of greedy wonder that it evoked back then, for it's a measure of how great an impact the book has had that much of its material now seems very familiar. This impact was felt on various fronts. First, Showalter's study was a major act of canon-busting or at least, a decisive intervention when it came to re-drawing the canonical lines. To be sure, certain key women writers, especially Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, received plenty of attention, and I shall return to this. But she also performed a major revivalist campaign on behalf of many authors who had fallen out of popularity and publication. Above all, she did so in a way which made their writings seem urgent to the concerns of the 1970s, however superficially stuffy their plots and values might appear. Gertainly, one must acknowledge, for example, the determining effects on their fictions of Charlotte Yonge's piety, or of Eliza Lynn Linton's conservatism concerning gender roles. But Showalter both shows their terrier-like professionalism, and, in what was to prove a highly influential critical insight, saw how the men in their fictions acted as

rT ,he NAVSA Conference both provides a showcase for the work that is currently being done in Victorian studies and offers a sustained opportunity for self-scrutiny, even at the most fundamental level. "Why do we keep the name 'Victorian studies'?" asks Amanda Anderson at the opening of her paper, delivered in a session that provoked a number of questions about the state, and the labeling, and indeed the identification of our disciplinary field. I will put my cards face up on the table. "Victorian" is an academic epithet with which I feel profoundly uneasy for a number of reasons. At a visceral level, I'm suspicious of the period fetishism it can connote, whether this be flaunted in the bric-a-brac of a Masterpiece Theater interior, or in sing-along performances of music-hall songs, or in the retro-marketing of sepia street scenes: none of these exercise any nostalgic tug on me. Indeed, I am profoundly glad not to have been Victorian. But there are two more compelling intellectual reasons for my discomfort with the term. First, I share with Sharon Marcus the view that it poses significant limitations when it comes to discussing the dynamics of transnational cultures, whether we are thinking about transatlantic relations, about the operations of empire, or about the increasingly global exchange in ideas as well as in economic capital. The very term "Victorian" carries with it an unmistakable national, and nationalist, overtone. Writing about the "Victorian" Loyalty Islands-as Talia Schaffer shows Charlotte Yonge to have been doing over a couple of decades-is (to offer an obvious example) only one possible perspective on colonial projects in Melanesia during the nineteenth century. And second, and this is reflected in both Anderson's and Lauren Goodlad's essays, the length of a reign-even the years of a centuryprovides at best only the most tenuous of containers for intellectual and social movements that spill beyond it, let alone for the disciplinary problems to which such unreflective periodization gives rise.

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the Nineteenth Century and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of the works received by SEL for consideration follow.

A book destroyed can be a beautiful thing. It can be dampened, moulded into a new shape, and photographed. It can be folded and pleated. It can be delicately cut into fantastical forms, or chiselled into a solid pistol-shape. In the case of these last three examples, it can then be re-presented in two-dimensional form, as a photographic image. Images of books that have been destroyed through negligence or catastrophe or as the result of acts of war or the nibbling teeth of mice can have, on occasion, their own shocking beauty.

The Lifted Veil (1859) is a text concerned with the interplay between science and the imagination. It is informed by The Physiology of Common Life, the work that G. H. Lewes published in the same year, and in many ways is in a dialogue with this work, asking that if we could look into someone's mind with the same power that a physician can examine the body, would we choose to exercise this specular power? The essay shows how George Eliot employs some of the same language that Lewes uses in his scientific writing, especially in the context of the circulation of blood and the circulation of feeling. Blood is crucial to this novella, and its wider nineteenth-century implications are also raised. In particular, the blood transfusion scene in The Lifted Veil is shown not to be a piece of mere Gothic melodrama but to be rooted in contemporary debate about transfusion. Historical specificity is reinforced through showing that Meunier, the doctor, had an actual prototype in the figure of Brown-Séquard. Examining these aspects of the novella raises questions about gender and authority. It is argued that, despite the dialogue with Lewes's work that occurs in The Lifted Veil, George Eliot gives even greater priority than Lewes does to the role of the imagination and to the provocative nature of that which cannot be revealed by science.

This article sets out to explore the use to which the figure of the “American Girl” was put in that late nineteenth‐century fiction which brought her into collision with English culture. Looking particularly at the work of Rhoda Broughton and Elizabeth Bisland (A Widower Indeed, 1892), Sara Jeannette Duncan (An American Girl in London, 1891, and A Daughter of To‐Day, 1894), and Ella D'Arcy ("The Pleasure‐Pilgrim”, 1895), it argues that their provocative heroines may display some of the independence of mind and body associated with the New Woman, and are used to critique contemporary English society, but they resist being read in the same terms. In turn, this apparent illegibility to an English audience is reflective of broader anxieties concerning new American culture, and the difficulty of assimilating it within English patterns of representation.

This collaborative History aims to become the standard work on Victorian literature for the twenty-first century. Well-known scholars introduce readers to their particular fields, discuss influential critical debates, and offer illuminating contextual detail to situate authors and works in their wider cultural and historical contexts. Sections on publishing and readership, and a chronological survey of major literary developments between 1837 and 1901, are followed by essays on topics including sexuality, sensation, cityscapes, melodrama, epic, and economics. Victorian writing is placed in its complex relation to the Empire, Europe, and America, as well as to Britain’s component nations. The final chapters consider how Victorian literature, and the period as a whole, influenced twentieth-century writers. Original, lucid, and stimulating, each chapter is an important contribution to Victorian literary studies. Together, the contributors have created an engaging discussion of the ways in which the Victorians saw themselves, and of how their influence has persisted.

‘Photographs’, Susan Sontag tells us near the beginning of her seminal work, On Photography, ‘furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.’1 She goes on to explore the reasons why this should be the case — even though we know that photographs can distort, be posed, altered, tampered with, recontextualized — and she concludes with a disgruntled lament that ‘Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted… That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.’2 But what happens, I want to ask in this chapter, when a book ends up in a photograph; when the material volume is deployed for aesthetic ends — or at the very least, when our interpretation of reading is mediated through a camera lens? What kind of evidence is being offered up?

The myth of the White Indian resurfaced at regular intervals during the nineteenth century. Such European beginnings for native peoples were looked for in order that their supposed nobility or their claim on the care and compassion of white people, might be given some foundation within a superior culture.1 These tales and theories of origin could be found in serious proto-anthropological writing as well as in such obviously fictional forms as Robert Southey’s epic poem Madoc (1805; 1812). As well as serving to legitimize, even elevate the status of Indians in Anglo-American and European eyes, these narratives were part of an ongoing attempt to trace and understand racial difference in general, and to establish whether humanity was descended from one, or several racial bases.