Although romance QUA romance is often seen as leading to the grim finality of the Victorian marriage plot, Charlotte Brontë's second novel, Shirley (1849), thwarts readerly expectations. Brontë cautions the reader that “if you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken,” but also teases that “it is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting” (39; ch. 1). This disavowal, coupled with contradicting hints of romance, appears in the second paragraph of Shirley and establishes the vexed dynamic surrounding the marriage plot present throughout the novel.

In 1862 parliament deliberated the Lunacy Regulation Bill, which stipulated that medical testimony keep to the broad road of “fact” and not stray into the crooked alleyways of speculative “opinion.” During its debates, the House of Lords sometimes sounded like a parliamentary annex of Punch, or of Swift's Academy of Projectors. Decrying how “the very idea of a mad doctor's examination has become a by-word,” the Lord Chancellor (Lord Westbury) and the Earl of Shaftesbury furnished anecdotes pointing to which way forensic madness lies: in the neighborhood of the lunacy expert who pronounced a fashionable lady deranged for sporting a dagger (“Dear me,” she protested, “if I am insane for that reason, nine-tenths of the ladies in Paris are insane too”); the eminent physician who detected incipient madness in a four-year-old whose cranium exceeded the sanity standard by ½″; the learned gentleman who diagnosed “fatuity and mania” in a female defendant because she could not tell “how much £100 a year was a week,” an impromptu sum which also flummoxed its proposer (“Don't be nervous,” coaxed the cross-examining counsel, “how much is it?”). While no one advocated barring the testimony of medical men entirely, many were reluctant to grant too much influence to paid witnesses interested in advertising expertise, and whose professional bonnets, it would appear, buzzed with their own pet-theoretical bees. The legal distinction between sanity and insanity was not to be drawn lightly for in many respects it was a property line, the critical boundary between free agency and economic wardship. The pertinent questions, argued the Economist, were simply two: “Is A B fit to manage his money? Did A B commit a particular act with … a knowledge that it was wrong, or did he not do it?” As Lord Westbury noted, medical opinion could confuse these issues because doctors and lawyers share deceptively similar terms of art — “lunacy,” “imbecility,” “unsoundness” — but apply them differently and according to incompatible evidentiary procedures. Medicine considers insanity as a matter of disease, he asserted; the law, as a matter of “fact.” In its efforts to serve justice by excluding quackery, the House of Lords burnished its own legislative authority by portraying medicine as self-interested and compromised by multiple interpretive perspectives, and by characterizing the law, by contrast, as reliably linked to empirical fact. What from afar might look like a seamless medico-juridical institution is in truth scored with hairline fractures, if not sizable rifts.

Like many other seventeen-year-olds, Miss Ginevra Fanshawe in Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) practices self-reflexive, generic word play as she characteristically “substituted this word ‘chose’ in temporary oblivion of the real name. It was a habit she had: ‘chose’ came in at every turn in her conversation — the convenient substitute for any missing word in any language she might chance at the time to be speaking” (115–16; ch. 6). Ginevra's word choice appears by no means accidental in this text riddled with (often bilingual) word-play substitutions, what Mary Pollack in a different context terms the novel's “rich matrix of conflicting insights about the nature of language” (54). In fact, chose seems a repeated code word for the enigmatic x, or thing itself, “the thing, the spirit, and the secret itself” (557; ch. 38), which Lucy sees in Paul and which lovers, metaphysicians, and literary theorists alike nostalgically, if not narcissistically, long to re-present. The word most often substituted for “thing” in the text is “shape,” like the “dark, usurping shape” (569; ch. 39) of the spectral nun, the problem being, however, that every such double or “daemonic shape” (Freud 143) uncannily either erases itself or serially forks into other metonymic representations which problematize any homesick quest for origins. Even the “shapes” of the “paving-stones,” which Lucy pointedly re-members a year later at the “very threshold” (305; ch. 21) of the entrance of Madame Beck's Pensionnat, only provide a kind of liminal entrancement, another abyssal signifier uncannily signifying uncertain values.

What has come to be called reader-response criticism and theory was ascendant within literary studies in the 1970s and eighties but seems to have waned in the nineties. Edited collections such as Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman's The Reader in the Text and Jane Tompkins's Reader-Response Criticism, both published in 1980, continue to be important references and are still cited frequently. Comparable edited collections published in the nineties, though, such as James Machor's Readers in History (1993) and Andrew Bennett's Readers and Reading (1995) have not received the attention of the earlier collections, and most of the essays in Readers and Reading are reprints of articles published in the eighties. Individuals associated with the reader-response movement such as Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Wolfgang Iser continue to publish books, although these books do not necessarily focus on reading. The journal that I co-edit, Reader, which originated as a newsletter in 1976 as a result of an MLA session on reading that attracted hundreds of people, continues. It remains, though, one of a small number of journals devoted to reading and readers aimed at a university-level audience.

There has been an intriguing range of material published concerning Victorian painting since Victorian Literature and Culture last offered an assessment of the field. These books, including exhibition catalogues, monographs, and collections of essays, represent new and important sources for research in Victorian art and its cultural contexts. Most striking of all during this interval has been the range of exhibitions, from focus on the Pre-Raphaelites to major installations of such Victorian High Olympians/High Renaissance painters as Frederic, Lord Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Included as well have been exhibitions with a particular focus, such as that on the Grosvenor Gallery, and the more broadly inclusive The Victorians held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this last being the most appropriate point of departure to assess the impact of Victorian art on the viewing public in the States.

The idea of a literary canon is inextricably connected in English-speaking countries with the Arnolds: Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, who was credited with revivifying the classical curriculum while recreating the great public schools, and his eldest son, Matthew, the most influential nineteenth-century spokesman for the moral, spiritual, social, and cultural efficacy of a canon widened to include English poetry and available, at least in theory, to every literate English person. Like his father, Matthew Arnold was a professional educator: he earned his living as an inspector of schools, mostly elementary schools for the poor. For both Arnolds, the canon is the curriculum at the heart of the pedagogical enterprise; and the grand, almost mystical power they attached to it spilled over onto the pedagogue. Their professional careers entailed considerable sacrifice of worldly ambition, but the power of pedagogy as they conceived it became their object and their reward.

By February of 1858, the American abolitionist community had at least twice been exposed to a poem — attributed to Robert Browning — entitled “The King is Cold.” It appeared in January in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly newspaper published in New York City, and, one month later, it was reprinted in William Garrison's Boston paper, the Liberator. Yet aside from this brief record of publication, the poem has left no discernible traces, either before or since. The oddly one-sided (i.e., American) appearances of “The King is Cold” surely contributed to its being overlooked by generations of Browning scholars and editors, including such modern fugitive-hunters as Broughton, Honan, and Kelley. In fact, with a few notable exceptions, Browning scholarship has been reluctant to extend its efforts across the Atlantic. We still await an analysis of the poet's American transactions that would update the important research done by Louise Greer in the 1950s. For most of his life, Browning was much more popular in the United States than in England, and, as Greer puts it, “Browning must have known more Americans than any other English man of letters” (39). And, although their author never visited the United States, Browning's poems arrived by the 1840s, finding enthusiastic audiences that included such luminaries as Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson, and Thomas Higginson. This Boston intellectual clique — transcendentalist, Unitarian, and abolitionist — recognized in Robert (and, more rapidly, in Elizabeth Barrett) the “brave translunary things that our first poets had” (Lowell qtd. in Greer 14). As the uncatalogued existence of “The King is Cold” suggests, the fruits of this special relationship remain incompletely gathered.

In a recent review essay in this journal (25.2), Timothy Morton considered a number of works of literary criticism on the centrality of commodification in Victorian literature and culture. This essay will look at the intersection of work in which economists and literary critics have interrogated Victorian economics and their afterlife: models of production and reproduction (classical political economy and Malthusian population theory), consumption (the calculation of pleasure, happiness, and taste), labor (as a theory of value), value (in relation to price), “Economic Man” (as productive pursuer of gain or, after the 1870s, rational chooser among scarcity), and so forth. This work, which has brought into dialogue economists, literary and cultural critics, and historians and philosophers of science, has flourished in the past decade, and this essay will focus on aspects of it relevant to the study of Victorian Britain.

Literature and science: no longer two cultures? Back in the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn headed us toward this conclusion when he emphasized how deeply science was embedded in culture in The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962). Since then, both cultural and literary analysts have theorized about just how literary texts actualize cultural assumptions, including those of science (Michael Riffaterre, “Flaubert's Presuppositions,” Diacritics 11: 2–11). Science offers but one of a number of competing discourses within a culture (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989); authors — of all sorts — are free to reconstruct any of them, and both science and literature realize culture. I draw the verb, “realize,” from Gillian Beer, whose book Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter offers the occasion for this review. Beer's book reprints fourteen masterful essays that delineate ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific ideas have been realized. Beer chooses her verb carefully. Scientists, she suggests, are no different from other purveyors of ideas; they never know whom their work will influence or whose ends it will serve. Helmholtz can, for example, turn up in a poem by Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. We are always to understand that the cultural encounter between science and society moves in both directions and that any culture can provide striking correspondences. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, scientific hunts for missing links evolved concurrently with the sleuthing of literary detectives.

One of the most influential of recent efforts to take Hardy's strange poetic reputation in hand has been that of Donald Davie, himself a poet, who in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry saluted Hardy's “scientific humanism” and noted his poetic “engineering” as that of a poetically “self-made man.” Thus Davie re-made Hardy, creating a combination of a poetic Samuel Smiles and a poetic Isambard Kingdom Brunei conducting himself with technical assurance and brio — but with limited and “mechanical” poetic aims (13, 40). Perhaps it's the “visibly ideological” nature of Davie's performance here which makes it still so arresting, and “smaller and clearer as the years go by.” In a once-famous essay, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” T. S. Eliot complained (or at least explained) that the many writers about him re-made Shakespeare in their own images. Coleridge's “smack of Hamlet,” which read off a Hamlet invested with his own qualities as he construed them, perhaps also indicates how common this sort of thing may be.