VANITY FAIR IS A NOVEL OF ENIGMAS. In particular, after finishing the book, readers have often wondered why Thackeray refuses to tell us clearly whether or not Becky actually kills Joseph Sedley in chapter 67–a question recently given prominence by John Sutherland as one of the “Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature” (66–72). The explanation most commonly given for Thackeray's evasiveness on this point is that such unanswered questions in Vanity Fair are part of the artistry of this unconventional work of fiction, a book that A. E. Dyson has described as “surely one of the world's most devious novels” (76). This view of Vanity Fair as a novel of narrative legerdemain–intended to keep the reader constantly alert and pondering what is being shown (or concealed)–is certainly true. However, an additional possible explanation for Thackeray's ambiguity on the subject of Jos's death also ought to be considered. This explanation lies in Thackeray's horrified reaction to the public execution of François Benjamin Courvoisier on 6 July 1840. The echoes between Thackeray's appalled description of the events of that morning and his subsequent famous novel suggest that he privately conceived of Becky as murdering Jos. The echoes also suggest that one reason why Thackeray handled this fictional murder obliquely is that, by the time of writing Vanity Fair, he had come to believe that, although executions might occur, they should not take place in public. Exploring the subtle connections between Thackeray's profound revulsion at the death of Courvoisier and Thackeray's later treatment of Jos's death gives deeper meaning to the intentional ambiguities in chapter 67. These connections make the ambiguities surrounding the death of Jos part of a widespread debate over capital punishment in the 1840s and have significant ramifications in terms of the parallel between public executions and pornography and with regard to the role of Becky in this novel.

IN 1895, GRANT ALLEN PUBLISHED A NEW WOMAN NOVEL entitled The Woman Who Did. This treatise-like novel appeared as part of the Keynotes Series, a group of ideologically progressive texts published by John Lane for Bodley Head in the 1890s. As Margaret Diane Stetz writes, Lane made this series “a haven for ‘New Woman’ fiction, naturalistic short stories, and ‘decadent’ poetry and art” (72). Marketed as status and sex objects (81), many of the thirty-three novels and short-story collections that make up the series concern themselves with New Woman issues such as marriage and female sexuality. Lane had taken the name for this series from George Egerton's Keynotes (1893), a collection of short stories told from the perspective of an emancipated woman. The Woman Who Did, published two years later, also featured a New Woman and became the most notorious book of the series. Combining a free-love, anti-marriage message with a tragic plot, Allen's novel focuses on a clergyman's daughter, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry the father of her child, Alan Merrick, on feminist principles. Unwilling to enter an institution that she compares to “vile slavery” (43), she chooses to live unmarried with her lover and daughter until his death. She withstands the calumny of family and friends and years of grieving and penury only to discover in the end that her daughter rejects her feminism and views her illegitimacy not as the “supreme privilege” her mother believed it to be, but rather as a “curse” (132). In a way typical of New Woman novels, the story ends with the heroine's suicide.

C. L. (CATHERINE LOUISA) PIRKIS'S “The Murder at Troyte's Hill,” second in her series of stories about Detective Loveday Brooke, begins with Brooke's boss debriefing her on a case: “Griffiths, of the Newcastle Constabulary, has the case in hand…. Those Newcastle men are keen-witted, shrewd fellows, and very jealous of outside interference. They only sent to me under protest, as it were, because they wanted your sharp wits at work inside the house” (528). This is a typical beginning for one of Brooke's adventures, which were published in the London magazine Ludgate Monthly in 1893 and 1894. As one of the earliest professional female detectives in English literary history, Brooke's career was marked by conflicts with territorial male officers and the ever-present pressure to keep her detective work “inside the house.” Emerging at a historical moment when understandings of women, criminality, and law enforcement were rapidly changing in Britain, Pirkis's stories offer an interpretation of these intersecting cultural shifts that is surprisingly different from her contemporaries. In a decade rife with scientific interrogation into the nature of criminality, such as in the work of Havelock Ellis and Francis Galton, detective fiction of the 1890s tended to mimic scientific discourse in its representations of criminals. The Brooke stories, however, challenge such conceptions of deviance and reveal the poverty of their underlying understandings of crime as well as gender.

Does a theory of literary kinds involve the supposition that every work belongs to a kind? The question is not raised in any discussion we know. If we were to answer by analogy to the natural world, we should certainly answer ‘yes’: even the whale and the bat can be placed; and we admit of creatures who are transitions from one kingdom to another.

—René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1942)

His anatomy was philosophic, or transcendent, because transcending the vision of the eye, it had the vision of the mind, seeing what the eye alone could never see.

—G. H. Lewes, “Life and Doctrine of Geoffroy St. Hilaire”

Scientific material does not have clear boundaries once it enters literature.

—Dame Gillian Beer, Open Fields

JANE EYRE IS A NOVEL INTENSELY CONCERNED with reading and being read. It is a text fixated on acts of literacy and states of legibility, and it produces reading as a compelling, multivalent locus for narrative pleasures and for the articulation of desire. Jane Eyre grants the greatest possible significance to every form of literacy, frequently structuring its articulations of the erotic through reading: reading books or watching others read them, successfully (or unsuccessfully) reading the faces and heads of others, and controlling or failing to command one's legibility. These many crucial literacies do not originate from a chance narrative enthusiasm, but are centrally linked to the novel's equally intense interest in the classificatory arrangements of phrenological systems. Phrenology, that famous nineteenth-century pseudo-science of reading, enables the production of the novel's multiple erotic strands, structuring not only a considerable portion of the heterosexual romance plot(s), but articulating and enabling the novel's female homoerotic dynamics, as well.

OVER THE COURSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, England saw the publication of numerous social instruction handbooks, household manuals, cookery books, and restaurant guides focusing on the proper methods for dining. These dining handbooks provide a systematic account of the most minute details for both attending and hosting a dinner party, including such information as how to word the invitations, ornament the table, order the courses, or arrange guests according to precedence. To the extent that formal dining becomes standardized in the conduct literature, a dining taxonomy begins to emerge–a classificatory system whereby formerly idiosyncratic aspects of this social experience are codified, or reduced to a code, and routinized, or rendered routine. While the content of handbooks (the social conventions) is arranged into a taxonomy, something more interesting can be seen to appear as well: conventions for the dining taxonomy itself. That is, within the large body of Victorian dining handbooks, there is not only a striking repetition of content from one handbook to the next, but also a repetition of narrative styles, patterns, and devices that imply that the procedures under discussion are universal phenomena, divorced from human agency, interpretation, and variable social circumstances. In other words, these handbooks render the conventions natural.

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, scientific taxonomies shaped fictional narratives in highly ambiguous ways. On the one hand, novels–to take the predominant literary genre of the time–invoked the language of science to lend their structures the authority of those models of rationality that seemed to provide the most credible explanations of the observable world. Quite naturally, the project of realism, in its search for verisimilitude, drew upon those explanatory schemas that seemed to offer the closest simulacra of the real. Yet the novels of the period also resisted the authority of the scientific discourses they incorporated. If scientific taxonomies tend toward aggregation–in other words, the fitting of newly discovered forms within classificatory systems of previously known structures–novels, it can be argued, tend toward disaggregation, the resistance of individual characters to those social categories that seek to contain them.

IN 1830, 57,000 PASSENGERS DEPARTED BRITISH PORTS for overseas destinations. By 1840, the figure had risen to 185,000; by 1850, it had reached 281,000, a five-fold increase in just twenty years. Although these figures relate to all departees, they nevertheless give some indication of the sheer scale of mid nineteenth-century emigration from Britain, and it should be no surprise that a sizeable industry developed to supply the growing number of passengers, to meet their victualling needs, provide tools, equipment, and accommodation, as well as information about prospective destinations. The emigrant's departure was urged on by an outpouring of enthusiastic writings in mainstream periodicals and newspapers, by emigrant handbooks, illustrated volumes, and hand-colored prints. These descriptions of new, alluring, distant lands were set off against equally stylized construals of the old country in which the relative independence available to colonial settlers was contrasted with the unfavorable situation many faced in Britain. Addressing himself to the agricultural laborer in 1843, for example, John Chase bade him scan the changeable British skies, consider the bitter winter, poor accommodation, endemic sickness, his wife and children starving, the apothecary's bill accumulating, while the tax gatherer and landlord hovered at the door. Then look at the Cape, Chase urged, with its celestial climate, where sickness was the exception, where doctors pined for want of patients and apothecaries were impoverished for want of custom, where the tax gatherer was never seen and the landlord was the emigrant himself (243–44).

Forgery is now considered an offence of the greatest magnitude;… In proportion, therefore, as a nation increases in wealth by buying and selling, it will magnify the criminality of a fraud by which buying and selling may be checked. The change of opinion will show itself in the penal laws, and in the not less deterrent force of social reprobation.

—Luke Owen Pike, History of Crime in England (1876)

THOMAS MITCHELL (1792–1855), explorer and Surveyor-General in New South Wales between 1828 and 1855, was a talented and competent draughtsman who was responsible for the original sketches and even some of the lithographs he used to illustrate his two journals of exploration, published in 1838 and 1848. In this paper, I will be concerned with the 1838 journal, entitled Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with descriptions of the recently explored region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales. On the whole, it is a detailed and lavishly illustrated account of the land Mitchell encountered, along with its inhabitants and natural history. My particular interest is in offering an explanation for differences between a sepia sketch depicting a cave at Wellington, NSW, that Mitchell prepared as one of the illustrations for geological material included in this journal, and the final lithograph.

MR. TULLIVER DRAWS LITTLE ATTENTION from critics of The Mill on the Floss compared to his children, Maggie and Tom, and his finances are hardly ever looked at in any detail, just as other sections of George Eliot's novel that concern economics are not. Yet George Eliot says Mr. Tulliver has his tragedy, as do his daughter and son, and it is precisely Mr. Tulliver's money trouble, his bankruptcy, that sets the condition for the troubles of the next generation. I seek to trace a narrative logic for a novel that has seemed to many to strain plot coherence, and I do so by an economic analysis that allows a link to be drawn between such seemingly disparate tragedies as a father's financial ruin and death and his children's drowning, with the sister giving up love then life itself to reclaim her brother's favor, seeking in vain to rescue him from a flood.

WHEN SIKES AND NANCY RECAPTURE OLIVER, in Dickens's Oliver Twist, intending to return him to the gang of thieves, Sikes warns Oliver against crying out to passersby, announcing that his dog will go for Oliver's throat if he so much as speaks one word. Looking at the dog, who is eyeing Oliver and growling and licking his lips, “with a kind of grim and ferocious approval,” Sikes tells Oliver, “He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!” (109; ch. 16). Sikes of course simply intends to say that his dog is as good as human, but Dickens's joke, in the context of the novel, is a chilling one. Sikes's bloodthirsty dog is as willing as the novel has shown many a professed Christian to be to exercise brute power over the weak and helpless, to drive Oliver into a life of crime, and to commit physical violence against him. In the course of the novel, Dickens shows what professed Christians have been willing to do to the poor and invites his readers to contemplate what they as Christians should instead be willing to do. Oliver Twist is of course deeply concerned with the condition of England's poor, and Dickens invokes the idea of Christianity as a rhetorical tool through which to make the social commentary that is at the novel's moral center.

…the ancient metaphor of the lean and the fat, the eaters and the eaten, still haunts the frame of political discourse.

—Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne

Space–my space–is not the context of which I constitute the textuality: instead, it is first of all my body, and then it is my body's counterpart or “other,” its mirror-image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or begets my body on the one hand, all other bodies on the other.

—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY is an important period in the history of psychiatry. According to the accepted narrative about the development of psychiatry as a field, in October of 1793, Philippe Pinel freed the patients at Bicêtre, the hospital for the insane in Paris. This act “heralded a new attitude to the insane,” as Pinel “abolished brutal repression” and “replaced it by a humanitarian medical approach” (Hunter 603). The French physician's approach to madness was officially brought to English soil when his text, A Treatise on Insanity, was translated into English in 1806 by D. D. Davis. His methods then began to appear in English practice and positively bloomed by mid century, particularly in the form of moral management, which advocated freeing patients of physical restraints and emphasizing their abilities to monitor their own behavior, while re-educating them about social mores and expectations (Showalter 27). The period from 1790 to 1850 has been called “the birth of psychiatry” (Donnelly viii).

IN AN EARLY VERSION of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford sketches, “The Last Generation of England” (1849), the narrator expresses a “wish…to put upon record some of the details of country town life,…for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing” (319). Before she begins her ethnographic preservation project, however, the narrator provides a disclaimer, suggesting the difficulty of categorizing the various aspects of what she is about to write: “As for classing the details with which I am acquainted under any heads, that will be impossible from their heterogeneous nature; I must write them down as they arise in my memory” (319). She then goes on to provide precisely what she claims is impossible–a categorical litany of the local inhabitants, beginning with the daughters of “very old” families who, “if unmarried, retired to live in–on their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there” (319). The reader is quickly taken through the town's social register, from “widows of the cadets of these same families,” to “professional men and their wives,” to a “grade lower…a class of single or widow ladies,” and on “[b]elow again,” to “the shopkeepers,” “the usual respectable and disrespectable poor,” and “a set of young men, [hanging about] ready for mischief and brutality” (319–20). Through her description, the narrator performs a double disavowal; heterogeneity prevents classification, but that very heterogeneity is itself what produces the need to classify. The rural society that serves as a precursor to Cranford (1851–53) represents a diversity that must be categorized–its hierarchy organized according to its uniqueness of place. Rendered as particular, readily-identifiable positions within the eccentric space of provincial English society, Cranford's denizens are inscribed through the Victorian fascination with taxonomy–a fascination with the seemingly paradoxical possibilities of “classing the details.”

WITH THESE ESSAYS, Victorian Literature and Culture begins a regular feature, “Victorians Live,” whose subject is how the Victorians still “live,” how they remain “live,” lively, alive. The focus is the intersection of the world of Victorian scholarship that the readers of VLC inhabit, with the larger world of representation. For, quite remarkably, in our globalized time, the Victorians remain “in”–from museum blockbusters to specialized exhibitions, from home decoration to popular fiction and graphic novels, from Masterpiece Theatre to Hollywood retellings of canonical novels. Rather than assuming an abyss between serious academic pursuits and the unserious non-academic world, Victorians Live seeks to chart the complex and ongoing dynamic wherein academic reinterpretations of the past, albeit in unexpected ways and with considerable time lags, shape the popular vision of the nineteenth century, and conversely, how contemporary social concerns as well as market demands on publishers and museums shape scholarship.

INTEREST IN VICTORIAN natural history illustration has burgeoned in recent years. Along with handsome, informative shows at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (“Picturing Natural History”), at the American Philosophical Society (“Natural History in North America, 1730–1860”), and at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne (“Nature's Art Revealed”), the year 2003 saw an entire conference devoted to the subject in Florence, Italy. In 2004, the eastern United States was treated to two more fauna- and flora-inspired shows, both dealing specifically with nineteenth-century British science and illustration.

AN EXHIBITION of Samuel Butler's photography in Gallery Sixteen, an elegant rotunda room just off the entrance to the Tate Britain, offered a rare opportunity to see some of the photography of the author of Erewhon and to contemplate how Victorian photographic realism fares in the setting of a modern museum. The exhibition, celebrating the centenary of Butler's death, ran from November 2002 to May 2003 and was made up of thirty-five framed photographs, some of them digitally touched up by Dudley Simons, and an assortment of photobooks and editions of Butler's self-illustrated volumes. It was developed by Tate curator Richard Humphreys and Butler scholar Elinor Shaffer, with the support of librarian Mark Nicholls from St. John's College at Cambridge, which houses most of Butler's extensive photographic work in its special collections. Titled “Samuel Butler and the Ignorant Eye,” after Shaffer's notion in her Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer, and Art Critic (1988) that Butler's photography renders “the eye of the viewer … ignorant and open” (229), the black-and-white secularism of Butler's work offered a startling change in imagery from the intense colorism of “Rossetti and Medievalism,” the exhibit that preceded it in Gallery sixteen.

EXPOSED: THE VICTORIAN NUDE, an extensive exhibition initiated by and first shown at Tate Britain in 2002, and The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber, a best-selling novel set in Victorian times and published in the same year, illustrate the interchange of the scholarly and the popular, more particularly how the recent rich work in Victorian sexuality, familiar to readers of this journal, informs and is transformed within blockbuster museum shows and popular fiction. Both exhibition and novel shed some light on the question of how the Victorians have become so sexy.