This chapter explores Harkness’s first novel in the context of socialist fiction and the future of the modern novel in the 1880s. A City Girl pivots on one of the staple formulae of earlier nineteenth-century domestic melodrama and its radical political possibilities: a cross-class romantic relationship in which a working-class girl is seduced and abandoned by a gentleman. Unpicking how this novel reworks the inherited forms of radical melodrama helps to shed new light on Friedrich Engels’s famous critique of the work’s relation to realism and the status of literary naturalism in 1880s Britain. The Princess Casamassima – Henry James’s self-consciously experimental foray into naturalism and the political activism of 1880s London – serves as a counterpoint to illustrate the pressure of representation in the modernity of late Victorian mass culture. The chapter ends by returning to Katharine Buildings, Whitechapel, and Harkness’s time spent there researching A City Girl. Drawing on the correspondence and record books of Ella Pycroft, the resident lady rent collector, and Harkness’s cousin Beatrice Potter Webb, this chapter presents a counter-narrative that suggests how the residents themselves tried to write back their own life stories against an interpretative community of social activists, philanthropists, novelists, and political agents.

Margaret Harkness’s serial story ‘Connie’ appeared in the socialist Labour Elector in 1893–94, but was left unfinished when the periodical folded, reaching no conclusion to the cross-class romance between actress Connie and her lover, the son of a rural landowner. This chapter explores how Harkness uses melodrama in the serial to create a specific form of socialism: one based on the Tory narratives of duty, guidance, and a harmonious relationship across social classes. By focusing on Harkness’s use of the dual lenses of melodrama and Tory socialism, this chapter demonstrates the ways that Harkness uses the former to elucidate working-class women’s precarious social position under capitalism, and the latter to indicate possibilities for the amelioration of this compromised position.

This chapter looks beyond bio-critical interpretations of Harkness and her work to address the ‘subject’ Margaret Harkness, and specifically her relationship with her pseudonym, ‘John Law’. Although female authors’ use of male pseudonyms was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, the chapter argues that, for Harkness, it constitutes a rejection of personalised character analysis: ‘John Law’, it suggests, signifies ‘not Margaret Harkness’. This rejection of psychologisation applies both to Harkness’s authorial identity and to her representation of working-class life and characters, as the chapter shows by placing Harkness’s work in a tradition of individualisation and psychological portraiture of working-class characters in the nineteenth century. It argues that Harkness’s work is rendered distinct by the fact that her characters cannot use subjective means to challenge their material experience.

Reading Blake’s art as less the product of a Gothic than of a ‘gothicising’ imagination, David Baulch argues that Blake’s conception of the Gothic as ‘Living Form’ interrupts logics of precedence, consequence, and causation more broadly, turning the sometimes conservative, regulative work of the Gothic inside out. In Baulch’s words, ‘[r]ecognising the political import in Living Form makes visible Blake’s dynamic conception of the Gothic, his most radical conception of being and its attendant potential for unprecedented difference’. Making this case means reconsidering Benjamin Heath Malkin’s influential though misleading representation of Blake as a Gothic artist, a representation that understands the Gothic as merely rustic, simple, anti-classical, and reactionary.

This chapter examines how Harkness and her contemporary W. T. Stead navigated the position of journalists with an activist agenda in a transatlantic market for socially engaged publications. It explores the extent to which both Harkness and Stead made use of the ‘rhetoric of progressive Protestantism’ across the generic categories of their writing: realist fiction, activist journalism, and critical travel writing. In examining the ‘clash between socialist and evangelical rhetoric’ in the context of emerging ‘modern marketing methods’, the chapter exposes the problems inherent in labels of ideological inconsistency as applied on gendered terms.

Jason Whittaker argues that Scott’s Engineers, a species of ‘dark angels’ who seem to have created human life accidentally, have their origin in Blake’s Zoas, thus locating the film’s action in a metaphysically distressing universe devoid of any fundamental benevolence or omniscience. Hence, ‘[t]he horror of Prometheus’, for Whittaker, ‘lies not so much in our disgust with the operations of the human body and in abjection as in the realisation that the secret history of the cosmos is utterly alien to us’. Human life is the product neither of a Divine, infallible creator nor a natural, evolutionary process, but rather of ‘an aberrant series of alien experiments’, an idea at the root of ‘the cosmic horror of Prometheus’.

This chapter is based on Harkness’s three London novels to explore how they provided a space in which she was able to experiment with a new style of literary realism designed to reflect both its historical moment and an evolving linguistic and political discourse. It argues that, in a period of social change, Harkness’s task in writing novels about contemporary social conditions required her to employ the shared language and conventions of the present but, crucially, to listen and hear the as yet unarticulated but evolving meanings of the future. It explores the ways in which Harkness’s writing participates in and contributes to emerging forms of experimental writing that seek to relay the experience of urban modernity.

Mark Lussier explores the field of subject formation from both Deluzian and Lacanian perspectives. ‘Shaped more than most by the erotic, esoteric, and exotic elements of Gothic symbolic’, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion explore how the unconscious ‘confront[s] the phallic order that animates patriarchy’, casting subject formation as a Gothic drama. For Lussier, both texts explore how subject formation involves a sort of wounding that the action of symbolisation—especially when that symbolisation is comprised of Gothic forms—can never entirely suture: what the eye sees and what the heart knows will remain always slightly askew, just as the Lacanian ‘I’ will never perfectly coincide with itself. Stressing the specific psychoanalytic terrain of female subjectivity, Lussier focuses most of his attention on Visions, a work in which Oothoon ‘endure[s] dual forms of objectification: her embodiment as an object of use (for the rapist Bromion) and as an object of exchange (for her ‘beloved’ Theotormon)’.

Despite its distance in time and history from Harkness’s original and best-known London novels, A Curate’s Promise in many ways brings Harkness’s oeuvre full circle. Set in the East End of London during the First World War, it resumes her focus on London’s marginalised communities and the efforts of the Salvation Army to ameliorate their condition. Through a reading of this final novel, this chapter draws together some of the strands of Harkness’s thinking which other scholars in this volume have begun to unravel, and considers her lasting ties to an organisation she never intended to join, but to the faithful chronicling of whose work she devoted a significant part of her long writing career.

Drawing parallels between Oothoon and James Graham, a sex therapist contemporary with Blake, Tristanne Connolly reimagines the sexual dynamics in Visions: Bromion’s violence does less to blunt than to sharpen Oothoon’s own sexual desire, which she proceeds to impose upon Theotormon, whom it is possible to read as not only another victim of Bromion’s ‘thunders’ but as an emasculated Onanist perceived by Oothoon—in an echo of Graham—as sexually deviant and self-polluting for his rejection of all alloerotic stimulation. Oothoon is a hybrid of Sade’s Justine and Juliette: she is a victim of sexualised violence but also sexually aggressive in her own way. Connolly’s paper productively complicates what has too often been a simplistic understanding of Oothoon as a mere victim, a reading that founders when we attempt to square it with her Grahamian promotion of sexual union and notorious offer to procure women for Theotormon. In this way, Oothoon moves past the typical categories available to women in the Gothic—either angel or monster, either virginal victim or wicked whore.

In ‘The Gothic Sublime’, Claire Colebrook identifies in Blake’s poetry what she calls a ‘Gothic sublime’, one that, unlike the Kantian sublime, destroys the integrity of the rational subject and allows ‘multiple voices and registers to generate what Deleuze (after Leibniz) refers to as “incompossible” worlds’. For her, Blake’s work is ‘overwhelmingly committed to an intuition of the infinite’ and not simply just to thinking the idea of it. Carefully following the Gothic structure of Blake’s worlds, and the nomadic Gothic line that is ever forming and deforming, Colebrook argues that Blake’s Gothic structures relate directly to their content, such as the ‘nightmarish multiplicity of voices’ and refusal of ‘constitutive finitude’. Blake’s Gothic sublime arrives not at the limits of experience (as in Kant), but with expanded perception, with the ‘invasion of reason from elsewhere’.