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“Published and Distributed on behalf of the people of India” by five of the founding regional associations of the Indian National Congress, An Appeal on Behalf of the People of India to the Electors of Great Britain and Ireland is now exceedingly rare, with only one copy recorded in WorldCat’s digital database of library catalogs. The pamphlet attempts to influence Britain’s newest and largest constituency of electors—those enfranchised by the Third Reform Act of 1884—to cast their first votes, in the general election of 1885, with their own and Indian colonial subjects’ shared democratic principles in mind. Although unsuccessful in promoting the return of its recommended candidates, An Appeal marks a key moment in British imperial history, when the empire, as it were, came home to speak in what would become the irresistible voice of the Indian National Congress. Its annotated republication is especially appropriate in this seventy-fifth-anniversary year of Indian independence (1947).

John Stuart Mill inscribed nearly 1,200 individual examples of marginalia into his personal copy of George Grote’s twelve-volume History of Greece (1846–56). Of these, roughly two-thirds are verbal annotations ranging in length from a single letter to a short paragraph. Analysis of the 136 annotations found in volumes one and two, and comparison of each page containing annotations across five editions of Grote’s History, reveal not only that Mill was directly responsible for sixty revisions made to the text of volumes one and two but also that Mill read and annotated his friend’s “opus magnum” multiple times. Considered not just in terms of its significance in intellectual history—when ancient Greece, specifically Athens, was repositioned as central to modern Britain, particularly as it was being reimagined by Victorian liberal reformers—but also as a case study for how to approach the epistemological challenges posed by marginalia more broadly, Mill’s interactive and durable relationship with Grote’s History testifies to the ongoing influence of reading conventions inherited by the Victorians from their Enlightenment and Romantic predecessors and demonstrates the heuristic value of considering marginalia’s effects in order to discern its content, attribution, intent, and chronology.

Although most often read for its fictional—and, for many reviewers and critics, vaguely unsatisfying—response to the condition of England question, Hard Times also analyzes the historical peculiarities of Victorian middle-class status with sufficient sophistication to test the limits of later sociological and cultural theory from Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. Attentive to several of the warrants that might legitimize the exercise of domination in Victorian society and reliant upon the use of type concepts at the level of character, Dickens identifies each possible warrant for public domination with one or more representative characters, whose respective loss of status before the end of the narrative then undermines his or her associated warrant. Their systematic repudiation results in a figure “of wonderful no-meaning,” middle-class status, which is provocatively constructed by Dickens on the basis of a series of categorical negations, and which therefore can be confirmed only through its recognition from those—whether circus performers or periodical readers—in a position to be dominated. In rendering status a highly figurative and uncertain affair, Hard Times suggests that ultimately novelists may be the best sociologists when it comes to representing the epistemologically unstable society of the Victorian middle classes.

Although most often read for its fictional—and, for many reviewers and critics, vaguely unsatisfying—response to the condition of England question, Hard Times also analyzes the historical peculiarities of Victorian middle-class status with sufficient sophistication to test the limits of later sociological and cultural theory from Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. Attentive to several of the warrants that might legitimize the exercise of domination in Victorian society and reliant upon the use of type concepts at the level of character, Dickens identifies each possible warrant for public domination with one or more representative characters, whose respective loss of status before the end of the narrative then undermines his or her associated warrant. Their systematic repudiation results in a figure “of wonderful no-meaning,” middle-class status, which is provocatively constructed by Dickens on the basis of a series of categorical negations, and which therefore can be confirmed only through its recognition from those—whether circus performers or periodical readers—in a position to be dominated. In rendering status a highly figurative and uncertain affair, Hard Times suggests that ultimately novelists may be the best sociologists when it comes to representing the epistemologically unstable society of the Victorian middle classes.

An almost ideal case study of what happens when an assertion of status meets an act of symbolic violence, the publication of Rufus Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America and its review by John Forster in the Foreign Quarterly Review also reveals some of the heuristic limitations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction . Due, in part, to key historical and cultural differences between 1960s France and 1840s Anglo-America, Bourdieu’s overdetermined materialism fully accounts for neither the complex of motives perceptible in Forster’s response to Griswold nor the epistemological uncertainty of class, status, and culture in Victorian England.

Republished in 2008 by the University of South Carolina Press after over 150 years of bibliographic oblivion and reconnected in 2009 to the currents of academic debate through a dedicated issue of Victorian Newsletter, William North's The City of the Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls: A Romance of the "Golden " Age (1850) significantly troubles the generic limits of the nineteenth-century novel. That is, in Butlerian terms, it parodically represents many normative elements of the dominant literary form of its day, and in so doing reveals that form's fundamentally constructed, arbitrary, even grotesque character. On a first reading, City may appear to belong alongside Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875), and other works concerned with capitalist speculation and England's expanding credit economy. Recently, Tamara Wagner's Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction has dramatically expanded the scope of such financial fiction well beyond such critical chestnuts, tracing Victorian novelists' fascination with improvident investment across the silver fork, social problem, domestic, sensational, high realist, and detective subgenres. Even within the rapidly diversifying portfolio of "new economic criticism" managed by Wagner, Gail Turley Houston, Martha Woodmansee, and Mark Osteen, and others, however. North's text appears as a complex multi-asset security among blue chips. Unlike its best-known contemporaries--in which the collapse of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company allows for the climactic exposure and domestic exorcism of selfishness, or the fall of Melmotte's empire of credit paves the way for a conservative retrenchment of the standards of gentlemanliness--City follows fraud for its own sake, and not as a figure for other characterological or social concerns. In thus reversing "the typical emphasis, moving formally marginal material--the financial... plots--to the center of the narrative," North's fiction may well be "unique among novels of economic critique" (Lamouria 18; Stem 50). (1) According to its modern editor, Patrick Scott, City is even more than that, however: "It is a book that, taken seriously, could reconfigure views about the literature of the 1840s" (Scott, "Introducing" 14). (2) The text's capacity to challenge our understanding of period fiction, in fact, grows out of its central fixation on London's financial juggle. By making financial speculation its sign rather than its signifier, City internalizes at the level of form the notion of unfettered free trade that it repudiates. That is, its critique of the market comes to look like the market: monstrously inclusive, with none of the aesthetic protections normally afforded to either the text or the reader by generic convention. North's own relationship to period conventions, whether societal or literary, was a vexed one at best. As reconstructed by Allan Life and Page Life, North's life, in the years leading up to the publication of City, seems grounded in his long-running rebellion against patriarchal authority, punctuated by unwise professional choices, imprisonment for debt, a possible illegitimate child, and increasingly paranoid exchanges with his contemporaries. North's literary production over this same period manifests a similar disdain for polite standards. In 1844, at the age of nineteen, he published Anti-Coningsby, a heavy-handed parody of Benjamin Disraeli's first Young England novel most notable for its opportunistic anti-Semitism. The next year, North released The Imposter, a conventional three-decker in form whose characters, including the self-proclaimed bastard son of Lord Byron, rather surprisingly speak and act according to the phrenological organ that each represents. Praised, despite its flaws, for its "entire originality...a new theme--a new style" by The Critic (576), the novel is, according to Life and Life, "among the most fascinating might-have-beens of Victorian literature" (68). …

First published in The Phantom Rickshaw (1888), the fifth volume in A. H. Wheeler & Co.'s “Indian Railway Library” series, “The Man Who Would Be King” may be the best and is almost certainly the last story that Rudyard Kipling wrote while still living in India. It is, then, the culmination of an annus mirabilis that saw its twenty-three-year-old author publish six books, albeit short ones, and achieve widespread fame in India. He also garnered sufficient acclaim in England that he would decide to resign his editorial position at George Allen's two Anglo-Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer, in favor of a literary life in London. In light of these biographical facts, readers might reasonably expect the story to offer a summative, even authoritative, conclusion about life and empire on the subcontinent that Kipling had represented so abundantly all year.

Britain played a multidimensional role in Cuba’s history during the Victorian period. This essay establishes an empirical warrant for the study of a distinctly Victorian Cuba by applying the tools of data mining and concordance analysis to ProQuest’s British Periodicals, Collections I & II . By identifying specific words and broader concepts that can guide future distant and close readings on this subject, it offers a highly transferrable case study on the use of digitized periodical collections to reconstruct a wide range of imaginative topoi for Victorian readers.

As has been noted since her recovery in the early 1990s by Isobel Armstrong, Angela Leighton, Dorothy Mermin, and others, much of Augusta Webster's poetry revolves around the problem of attenuated, suppressed, or otherwise circumscribed subjectivity. (1) Her work is particularly attentive to the frequency with which individuals could be stripped of their capacity for agency by the competing imperatives--social, material, institutional, and aesthetic--of modern life. Her dramatic poems, for which she is best remembered today, often feature the frustrated monologues of such over-determined individuals, both male, as in "A Painter," and female, as in her most critically discussed poem, "A Castaway." Pragmatic idealists at heart, these and others of Webster's speakers use a range of strategies, with varying degrees of success, to carve out niches of freedom for themselves amid the otherwise suffocating pressures of familial, vocational, and cultural norms. This essay concentrates on one recurrent motif, triangulation, through which Webster explores this problematic in the first two books of poetry that she published under her own name, Dramatic Studies (1866) and A Woman Sold and Other Poems (1867). (2) Collectively, the triadic poems from these two poetic collections represent triangular relations as both unavoidable and fascinatingly varied. Despite their important difference of participants, relations, and motivations, however, all retain the basic configuration, posited most famously in Rene Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965), of two subjects directed towards a third object. The problem, for Webster, lies in the readiness with which anyone occupying any of these three positions can be objectified by his or her participation in the triangle to the point of losing all capacity for independent agency. This risk is most apparent for the desired object, whose field of possibility is, at best, artificially confined to choosing between the two subjects, and, at worst, entirely eliminated by the results of those subjects' competition. Both subjects, however, also radically truncate their own actions by defining themselves oppositionally and teleologically. Whether possessed or bereft of the object at the contest's conclusion, the formerly dynamic subject ends in crippling stasis, one primary source of self-definition--the other subject banished from the scene, and the object of desire evacuated of significance and future potential by its acquisition. Tapping into and radically extending her century's pervasive rhetoric of fallenness, Webster shows that both men and women might "fall," their potential for independent agency equally imperiled by the threat of triangulation. (3) Two dramatic poems from her 1866 book, "The Snow Waste" and "With the Dead," make this point negatively, by featuring male speakers unable to distance themselves from their desires and, who, as a result, degenerate from competitive triadic subjects to damnably objectified souls in torment. Two of the shorter lyrics from among the Other Poems of the 1867 volume, "Too Faithful" and "To One of Many," signal Webster's shift away from compromised male speakers. Finally, in A Woman Sold, Webster offers her most complex, successful, and implicitly political resolution to this same problematic through the liberal intentions of the titular Eleanor-cum-Lady-Boycott. (4) Each of these poems by itself amply repays the detailed attention of careful close reading, which reveals Webster's complex deployment of triangulation at the levels of form, content, plot, and theme. (5) Together, they also work towards her elegant solution, at least at this important early point in her career, to the problem of abrogated, or "fallen" agency, namely emotional self-mastery and intellectual disinterestedness. (6) Competitive Triangulation and Damnation in Dramatic Studies Webster's "The Snow Waste" presents the narrative of an overly assertive subject eternally objectified by the successful prosecution of his own triangulated desire. …

“Goblin Market” offers readers seven tempting encounters with its superabundant goblins, including five episodes in which their wares are consumed, but only one explicit instance of redemption. This spiritual economy of scarcity hints at a moral and aesthetic imperative that includes heroic sisterhood while, through the poem’s appropriation of the conventions of parable, inviting further critical scrutiny. In the postredemptive moment enabled in the poem by Lizzie’s heroic resistance, and in the biblical narrative informing the poem by Christ’s death and resurrection, the interpretive fecundity of Rossetti’s critics emblematizes a world in which resistance and redemption are mutually constitutive.

As announced by its subtitle, “A Faerie Romance for Men and Women,” George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) occupies the noteworthy place of the first English fantasy novel written for adults. As such, it significantly influenced numerous future writers, among them C. S. Lewis, who in his Preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology credits the novel with Lewis’s own turn to mythopoetic Christian fantasy. 1 Unfortunately for MacDonald, who was seeking to earn a living and to continue in a pastoral vocation, both denied to him by his dismissal for doctrinal irregularity from the Congregationalist Church in Arundel in 1853, Phantastes was a commercial failure in its own time. Generic novelty doubtless played a role in the text’s unpopularity, although the rather severe judgments offered by reviewers for The Athenaeum and other periodicals suggest that further causes were not wanting (See Rev. of Phantastes). Briefly, Phantastes chronicles the episodic three-week visit to Fairy Land of the suggestively named Anodos, who has just turned twentyone and inherited the family estate. While in Fairy Land, he receives much unheeded advice from a range of female figures, acquires and eventually loses his own shadowy double, travels to the fairy palace, and ultimately returns to his conventional life after dying a heroic death. Densely symbolic, sometimes unproductively so, the novel deserves another look, not just for its effect on Lewis and others but also for its ecumenical engagement with issues and motifs of central concern to MacDonald’s Victorian contemporaries, including medievalism, Romanticism, and aestheticism, all of which inflect the wayward development of the protagonist’s masculinity through his encounters with art. 2

This essay draws upon Weberian sociology, law and literature studies, and Victorian novel criticism to explore Trollope's representation of the law in Orley Farm and The Eustace Diamond s. It reveals Trollope's damaging juxtaposition of the ethics of the realist novel and the commercialism of criminal advocacy in Orley Farm , and his persistent elevation of realist fiction as ethically superior to legal and romantic maneuvering in The Eustace Diamonds . Ultimately, the essay argues that Trollope is engaged in a vigorous competition on behalf of writers to rival lawyers for professional stature and charismatic authority in Victorian England.

Victoria’s coronation remains infamous as a royal ritual gone wrong. unrehearsed, with an undercurrent of chatter between the trainbearers, the ceremony was marred by an inadequate choir, confused clergy, and an undersized coronation ring. In fact, until public royal ritual was dramatically resurrected with Victoria’s assumption of the title empress of India in 1877, “great royal ceremo nies were not so much shared, corporate events as remote, inaccessible group rites, performed for the benefit of the few rather than the edifi cation of the many” (Cannadine, “Context” 111), and were character ized by “conspicuous ineptitude and borderline irrelevance” (“Context” 102). Certainly through the 1850s at least, civic ceremonials—mayoral inaugurations, celebrations by municipal corporations, and events like the Colchester Oyster Feast—displayed a similar lack of vitality. Government officials, the mainstream media, and the pragmatic middle-class public all expressed disapprobation at these and other rituals, including the elaboration of the Anglican liturgy sought by the Tractarians (and later the itualists) and the initiation ceremonies conducted by various trade unions. 2 Yet despite inept performances and disapproving audiences, ritual did have an important place in

Early in Charlotte Bront?'s Shirley, heroine Caroline Helstone criti cizes her cousin, mill-owner Robert Moore, for behaving as "if your living cloth-dressers were all machines like your frames and shears" (72). Coming on the heels of her declaration to him, "that there is something wrong in your notions of the best means of attaining happiness" (72), Caroline's analysis of Robert's "faults of manner" resonates with the larger debate in the 1840s over the sufficiency of utilitarianism, and materialism more generally, to ensure "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" of British men and women. Central to this debate were the materialist and idealist conceptions of individual character and its formation: for materialists, character was at once determined by circumstances and devoid of any metaphysical dimension; for idealists, by contrast, character was the product of individual choice and could not be fully understood apart from inef fable spiritual ends. From Caroline's idealist perspective, her cousin's materialist attitude towards his workers he neither expects nor wishes for them to love him signifies "a screw to be loose some where . . . out of her reach to set it right" (73). However, there is a double irony in her critique: first, her disapproval is, itself, registered in mechanistic terms she thinks he has a screw loose; and second, if Robert devoted to his workers even half of the fierce protectiveness that he reserves for his "grim, metal darlings" (384), if, in other words, he treated his workers more like his machines, then Caroline wOuld have significandy less ground for her disapprobation. The vulnerability of Caroline's idealist position to materiahst tropes