Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1861) exhibits the exhilarating characteristics of a Victorian sensation novel and then some: degenerate aristocracy, a sneering villain, flight, adultery, a child born out of wedlock, disfigurement, disguise, extended deathbed scenes, murder, and more (e.g., fake accents, false identities, an electrifying homicide trial, and a spectacular train wreck). But at the center of all the disaster, transgression, pathos, coincidence, and extremity, East Lynne is (mainly) the story of the aptly-named Isabel Vane, the beloved but patently bored wife who abandons her husband and children to run away with a handsome seducer. Overcome by remorse (and conveniently both disfigured and presumed dead), she returns to the home of her remarried husband to act as governess to her own children and to witness (at length and in painful detail) the life she might have had if she had denied her perpetually irrepressible but inappropriate feelings — feelings not so much of lust for another man, but of annoyance and tedium with the man she actually has. East Lynne urges (usually in the form of multiple diatribes from the third person narrator) that the wives and mothers of mid-Victorian England be content with their lot, employing a moral didacticism that insists on female domestic responsibility — and the attendant obligation of female suffering — with sadistic pleasure. And yet, when not lingering over the agonies of Isabel, the narrative gushes, seemingly despite itself, with sympathy for the heroine's life of monotony and misery. Indeed, East Lynne's compelling power comes in large part from the novel's skillful, lingering walk on a ledge of its own making and its protracted vacillation between condemnation and empathy for an unhappy heroine gone astray.

A critical darling, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula features several infamous blood transfusions. In that novel, Lucy Westenra receives blood transfusions from four different men, making her, according to Dr. Van Helsing, a polyandrist (158). In Stoker's novel, transfusion is not about medical verisimilitude so much as about romance or eroticism. Perhaps because of Dracula's status, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1896 story “Good Lady Ducayne” is often read as a vampire tale because it, too, includes blood transfusions. However, Braddon's engagement with contemporary medicine is very different than Stoker’s, since, unlike Dracula, Braddon's story engages with the experience of day-to-day medical treatment and is strongly invested in medical verisimilitude. Lauren M. E. Goodlad identifies the story's engagement with the medical profession largely through the character of Dr. Stafford, whom she views as a representative of the male-dominated, professional establishment. In Goodlad's reading, Lady Ducayne herself is a figure in both vampire literature and New Woman discourse as an “odd” woman, who becomes an “anti patriarchal figure of women's uncanny power to signify” (213). Goodlad's perceptive reading shows how the female vampire undermines conventional medicine, as embodied by Dr. Stafford. Yet, there is another physician in the story: Dr. Parravicini. If we take Dr. Parravicini as our starting point, we see that Braddon's critique of the medical profession is more wide-ranging and more radical than it previously appeared. What is Dr. Parravicini doing in this story? What is his relationship to Stafford and to the medical establishment? What does Braddon's realistic depiction of anesthesia and transfusion indicate about the medical profession and about the medicalization of modern culture?

Like all complicated relationships, that between realism and sensationalism has been subject to a good deal of rumour and speculation. In what might be described as the pair's first critical encounter – in an 1852 joint review of W. M. Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond and Wilkie Collins's proto-sensation novel Basil – a critic for Bentley's Miscellany intimates that a partnership between two such different forms is anything but likely. “We have,” he explains, “put these two books ‘over against’ each other, to use one of Mr. Thackeray's favourite Queen-Anne-isms, because they have no kind of family resemblance. They are, indeed, as unlike each other as any two books can be. They constitute a kind of literary antithesis” (“Esmond” 576). The inherently contradictory nature of this originary “over against” gesture – conflating proximity and distance, contiguity and difference – sets the keynote for subsequent discussions, contemporaneous and current, of a generic relationship that continues to attract and elude definition.

“I have read your poems – you can do anything” wrote Robert Browning to his close friend Alfred Domett on May 22, 1842, shortly after the latter had emigrated to New Zealand (Browning, Domett and Arnould 35). If this was in part friendly overpraise of Domett's verse, it was also a prognostication as to the effect of emigration. The idea (which also underlies Browning's poetic treatment of Domett's departure in the figure of Waring who “gave us all the slip”) was that “partial retirement and stopping the ears against the noise outside” would open up the possibility of something startlingly new: the little I, or anybody, can do as it is, comes of them going to New Zealand. . . . What I meant to say was – that only in your present condition of life, so far as I can see, is there any chance of your being able to find out . . . (sic) what is wanted, and how to supply the want when you precisely find it (35).

In the climactic finale to the first act of Oscar Wilde's 1895 play An Ideal Husband, Gertrude Chiltern convinces her husband, a Member of Parliament, not to support the construction of a boondoggle Argentinean canal. Gertrude, not her husband, is the ostensibly moral character here, since the canal's only purpose is to create wealth for its stockholders, but the language she uses in this impassioned speech quotes Guinevere, the contrite fallen wife in Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Near the end of the Idylls, recognizing that her infidelity has occasioned war, turmoil, and the end of Arthur's reign, Guinevere laments:

Ah my God,
What might I not have made of thy fair world,
Had I but loved thy highest creature here?
It was my duty to have loved the highest:
It surely was my profit had I known:
It would have been my pleasure had I seen.
We needs must love the highest when we see it (G 649–56)

George MacDonald took to preaching early in life. In his boyhood he once “rushed into the kitchen, jumped upon the clean-scrubbed table, and began a learned discourse, indicating Bell Mavor, the maid, as a reprobate past redemption”:

Although subtitled “A Domestic Story,” Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872) offers a sensational plot bursting with secrets and mistaken identities. Many of the novel's plot twists and turns center on the transformation of the hero, Oscar Dubourg, from a wealthy white Englishman into a dark blue “Other” when he is treated with nitrate of silver after a serious head injury. While Oscar's medication cures him of his seizures, it also causes agryria, a skin discoloration, which turns him permanently dark blue. The hero's experience of this traumatic side effect is exacerbated by the reaction of his blind fiancée Lucilla, the title's “Poor Miss Finch.” In the novel, Lucilla's blindness leads her to distort visual concepts such as light and color in her imagination, resulting in her desperate fear of dark colors. The novel's central conflict arises when Oscar engages the help of Lucilla's companion Madame Pratolungo in hiding his new dark skin color from the blind heroine. Complicating this situation further is the arrival of Oscar's identical (but still white) twin Nugent, who deviously schemes to elope with the beautiful Lucilla by impersonating his brother.

In the late 1880s, around the time he decided to settle on the Samoan island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson's writing began to take a strikingly different shape as he attempted to infuse it with the flavor of his new surroundings. “When Stevenson traveled to the margins of the empire,” John Kucich observes, “he suddenly found new ways of organizing his narratives” (59). His novel-length Pacific works The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide(1894), both nominally co-authored with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, made a marked departure from the dominant models for representing imperial space and themes provided by his own Treasure Island (1883) and by H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), and they were generally met by critics with bemusement and disappointment. One reviewer of The Ebb-Tide began by observing, “It certainly has no claim to a place with those romances which are already ranked among the classics of our tongue,” and concluded sorrowfully: “This is not the Stevenson we love, but it is something to be read and remembered, nevertheless” (qtd. in Maixner 458, 59). While recent critical interest in Stevenson's Pacific fiction has tended to focus on works such as “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) and the portrayal of cultural encounter, The Wrecker in particular continues to be held in low regard. As Stephen Arata summarizes,

Nineteenth-century male European travel writers sometimes romanticize their destinations and dream they have arrived in untouched lands. The Hawaii Isabella Bird visited, however, was not an idyllic land, forgotten by time. Early in the nineteenth century, steamships crossed the Pacific, carrying goods and people from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan. The trade in sandalwood and fur brought many foreign steamships into Hawaii (Kuykendall 15). It was not uncommon for American missionaries to arrive in Hawaii via whaling ships that stopped in Hawaii (Kuykendall 16, 41). Hawaii, with its position between mainland America and Asia, was a valuable and strategic piece of property. Isabella Bird Bishop's 1875 travel memoir The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands comments on the political situation the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) faced in the nineteenth century.

In the first half of the twentieth century, analytic bibliographers in Britain turned their attention to the systematic study of the nineteenth-century book. Developing their subject, they felt compelled to distance themselves from the Victorian book collector, who touched off a “suspicion . . . deeply ingrained in the mind of scholars and librarians” (Sadleir, “Development” 147). A new generation of bibliographers – Michael Sadleir, John Carter, and Graham Pollard – acknowledged that Victorian collecting had laid the foundations for the bibliographic study of books by “modern” (i.e., nineteenth-century) writers, as opposed to incunabula, the traditional focus of British book collecting. The contribution was regarded as fundamentally flawed, however, owing to a “sentimental element” in Victorian collecting (Carter and Pollard 101).

George Meredith's 1871 three-volume novel, The Adventures of Harry Richmond, follows the careers of the title character and his flamboyant father Richmond Roy, who perennially expects a court case to prove his claim to royalty. In the course of the narrative, the older Richmond changes from a comical, magical figure of enthusiasms and entertainments to a wreck of instability and loss. Roy's overindulgence, womanizing, and financial extravagance link such damaging and self-destructive behavior to an illness called in Meredith's day “circular insanity” – today known as manic-depression or bipolar disorder. From wild spending sprees to hypersexuality and delusions of grandeur, Roy's symptoms fit many of the major and associated criteria for recognizing manic-depression. Meredith begins the novel with a scene establishing clues about Roy's pathology. Though romanticized by Harry – and often by reviewers and critics as well – Roy's initial appearance reveals not a father coming in the middle of the night despite all obstacles for his five-year-old son; rather, the penniless Roy has walked in manic sleeplessness to coax money from his wealthy, neglected wife. Furious at his father-in-law's refusal to admit him, Richmond Roy then disappears into the darkness with his small son instead. The author's own family history and a character that parallels Roy in an earlier novel suggest that Meredith may have taken a personal interest in examining bipolar behaviors.

In Amy Levy's 1888 novel, The Romance of a Shop, four orphaned sisters, the Lorimers, open a photography studio in London and struggle to find business and a balance between free expression and propriety. Certainly, the sisters’ commercial involvement with photography can be read as artistic and unconventional for women of the time, but their position as artist-observers sometimes seems to relegate them to a space behind the lens and behind the window that divides their apartment from the society they look out upon. It is from that position as photographer-observer that Gertrude, the most introspective and yet most socially conscious of the sisters, wields her perceptive powers, her piercing gaze. Photography, and the way in which it influences her mode of observing, gives Gertrude an accurate, superior vision and a kind of social agency; but that gaze is negatively mediated by photography, too, filtered by the machine.

Of his nineteen years as a sailor, from 1874 to 1894, Joseph Conrad actually worked on ships for ten years and eight months, of which just over eight years were spent at sea, including nine months as a passenger (Najder 161–62). During these nomadic years, London was the place to which he returned again and again to seek his next berth, staying in a series of sailors’ homes, lodgings, and boarding houses. How did he spend his time, a single man with no family and few friends, whose main occupation was waiting? He recalled, in the preface to The Secret Agent, “solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days” (7). Ford Madox Ford says that Conrad knew all the bars around Fenchurch Street (which links the financial centre of the City of London to Whitechapel and the East End) from his days of waiting for a ship. Returning to the area later in life, according to Ford's slightly improbable memory, he “became at once the city-man gentleman-adventurer with an eye for a skirt,” who “could tell you where every husky earringed fellow with a blue, white-spotted handkerchief under his arm was going to. . . .” (Joseph Conrad 116, 117). The reality of these London sojourns was probably less romantic, most of the time. But there was one place where a sailor ashore, without much money, could always go for company and entertainment: the music-hall.

Near the end of Anthony Trollope'sThe Small House at Allington (1864), the protagonist Lily Dale disagrees with her mother about the prospect of marrying Johnny Eames, an earnest, but perhaps too ardent graduate of hobbledehoyhood whom Lily finds herself both unwilling and unable to love. Having been jilted by Adolphus Crosbie, a social climber as naïve as he is disingenuous, Lily protests that marrying Johnny Eames would constitute a form of adultery. “In my heart I am married to that other man,” Lily contends, “I gave myself to him, and loved him, and rejoiced in his love” (630; ch. 57). Noting that the situation may have changed – Crosbie has since married a noble's daughter and run through her fortune – Lily nevertheless maintains that there “are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been” (631; ch. 57).

In Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), Isabella Bird, one of the most celebrated travel writers of her time and the first female member of the Royal Geographical Society, asserts that she has found “the ‘MISSING LINK’” in the deep interior of Japan, on the island of Hokkaido (270). According to Bird, a wizened individual barely resembling man sits “crouched” in front of a disheveled hut, showing no “signs of intelligence” (270). In fact, this “missing link” Bird purports to have discovered was one of the Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido, who suffered the consequences of Japanese developmental schemes. Bird's identification of the forlorn figure as the “missing link,” an anachronistic being that lacks history and culture, is puzzling, as she encounters this haggard man after having already spent several days with the Ainu in Biratory, a small village in Hokkaido. During her stay, the Ainu villagers constantly speak of the strained relationship between themselves and the Japanese, as well as their discontent at Japanese prohibitions on Ainu traditions. In other words, they divulge the oppressiveness of Japan's so-called “modernizing” regulations and policies, and they attempt to inform their visitor of the history between the two conflicting peoples. However, their efforts seem to be lost on Bird. Rather than interpret the Ainu individual's ruined body as a corporeal text on which the history of colonial violence and exclusion is imprinted, Bird judges the man's beastly existence to be the evidence of his people's inferiority.

Inspired by the power and influence that Charles Darwin attributed to heredity in On the Origin of Species (1859), Francis Galton developed a program of eugenics that he believed could shape Britain's progress as a nation by managing the evolutionary development of the British race. In Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), Galton summarizes this aim as “to learn how far history may have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course” (1–2). While this project, Galton's life's work, was largely a process of analysis and the development of dictates that could be put in place to shape the reproduction of the nation, it was also a project of imagination; not only was Galton himself imagining a different future for Britain, but in promoting his program, he appealed to the imaginations of his readers in an attempt to get them to share his vision.

Although she did not feature in W. T. Stead's influential 1894 essay “The Novel of the Modern Woman,” Ménie Muriel Dowie (1867–1945) was firmly established as one of the pre-eminent New Woman writers after the publication of Gallia in 1895. A controversial novel in which “the eugenic project is overt,” Gallia has been of some interest to scholars of the New Woman novel (Ledger 70). Despite this, Dowie remains one of the more obscure of the New Woman writers and her work beyond Gallia is seldom discussed. However, one hundred years after its first publication, Gallia was reprinted by Everyman in 1995. Helen Small's introduction to this edition also contains the fullest account of Dowie's life to date, in which the author is shown to be “every bit as defiant of convention as the heroine of her first novel” (xxvi). But, as Small points out in this introduction, it was her 1891 book A Girl in the Karpathians, a vivacious account of a summer of intrepid independent travel undertaken in 1890 when Dowie was twenty-two years old and unmarried, as opposed to Gallia that first established Dowie's considerable contemporary literary reputation. A Girl in the Karpathians enjoyed enthusiastic reviews and impressive sales. The Review of Reviews deemed it “[t]he most noticed, and in some respects most noticeable, book of the month” (“The New Books of the Month” 627). In the first year alone, the book went through five English, four American, and one German edition, and its author quickly became something of a literary celebrity (Small xxviii). According to John Sutherland, Dowie proudly claimed that the book received four hundred reviews, all unanimous in their praise (195).

British Burma has never been adequately or even systematically studied as both students of modern Burmese history and British empire historians have given it relatively short shrift. Nonetheless, imperial rule lasted for nearly five generations and helped to produce the nation which now identifies itself as Myanmar. By the end of the nineteenth century, Burma was crucial to the wider South Asian economy, supplying oil, minerals, teak, and, above all, rice to destinations around the Indian Ocean. Yet, it took three Anglo-Burmese Wars to make Burma a part of British India. These conflicts are largely forgotten but they determined not only the fate of the country, but helped to shape its future trajectories. Military conflict proved more durable than colonization as independence brought with it a situation in which the “state has been continuously at war with the population mapped into its territorial claim” (Callahan 13). Nonetheless, the intellectual and cultural history of British Burma is rich and fascinating: colonial authors made the country their subject matter and they left behind a diverse corpus which bore the stamp of Victorian civilization. The experience of writing about Burma – particularly by those writers who identified with Burmese culture – produced some forgotten masterpieces. However, the dominant British understanding of the country arose from military conflict and occupation; this paper focuses on four British war narratives (which followed each of the Anglo-Burmese Wars) because they disclose more than their recounting of these conflicts might suggest. By exploring the works of John James Snodgrass, Henry Gouger, William F. B. Laurie, and Major Edmond Charles Browne, it will be possible to trace the beginnings of the colonizing narrative which helped to shape British rule. These writers experienced the Anglo-Burmese Wars directly and their narratives illustrate that they were “involuntary sightseers” recording not only the details of conflict, but their assessments of Burma and the Burmese.

In the preface to publisher John Murray's 1858 two-volume Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine, one of the first guidebooks specifically for British tourists to the Holy Land, author J. L. Porter claims that his objective is not just to provide a geographical summary or to outline travelers’ routes, but, more importantly, to link his descriptions with the “sacred dramas” of the Bible so that the tourist “may see with his ‘mind's eye’ each scene played over and over again” (xi). In such a spirit, this Murray guidebook tells both the well-known stories of the Bible and the more mundane particulars of finding interesting places and dealing with local middle-eastern people. The Handbook weaves together traditions of pilgrimage, the journey to a spiritual center, with tourism. In other words, it seeks to balance the pilgrim's desire for divine revelation with the tourist's interest in physical comfort and gentle visual stimulation. It incongruously pairs a conviction of the value of Christian self-sacrifice and hardship with a desire for bourgeois leisure. With a sly humility, Porter notes in his Preface: “The Bible is the best Handbook for Palestine; the present work is only intended to be a companion to it” (xi). As second to the Bible, this travel guide aspired to bring the English traveler's spiritual journey to the Holy Land into harmony with the secular pleasure of sightseeing.

Influences, Imitators, Offshoots, and Other Interlocutors: Punch Re-Rooted: Comedy and the Periodical Press 1820–1850

SHANNON R. SMITH

A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography

RICHARD L. STEIN

Oscar the Opera and the High-Pitched Life

GAIL TURLEY HOUSTON

Conversations with Oscar Wilde

ANN C. COLLEY

A Felt Experience: Touching the Book at Birkbeck, London

RYAN SWEET