In 1900 Edith Cooper (one half of “Michael Field”) completed “Caenis Caeneus,” later published in the posthumous volume Dedicated (1914). The poem tells the story of the warrior Caeneus, who, according to various classical sources, is transformed from the maiden Caenis into the youth Caeneus by the sea god Poseidon. Cooper’s poem dwells on the joy and strength Caeneus discovers as he grows from boy to man, narrating his epic adventures until his death in battle and transformation into a bird, before becoming Caenis again in the underworld. Despite the suggestive gender transition at its heart and its focus on masculinity, the poem has been regarded primarily as a reflection on the restrictions of femininity. In this article, we consider the poem as a test site for considering trans masculinity at the fin de siècle, locating this within Michael Field’s engagement with the classical past, tracing trans ecologies through Caeneus’s response to the natural environment, and engaging with developing theories of trans poetics. Ultimately, we demonstrate the rich analytical frameworks that transgender studies offers to Michael Field studies and to Victorian literature more broadly.

Prompted by the gaps in archival evidence for writing histories of minoritized lives, scholars, archivists, and artists have increasingly adopted speculative archival methods. Shaped by queer temporalities, Black feminist epistemologies, and decolonial approaches, speculative approaches use techniques from narrative fiction to envision and reconstruct the past while acknowledging the limitations of documentary evidence. This essay seeks to expand the potential of fictional character for writing minoritized historical subjects by reexamining the institutionalization of archives in the nineteenth century and their effect on what counts as archival proof. To do so, it looks to the archivist's queer other, the Victorian miser. First, the essay reads Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865) to show how the miser's hoarding challenges the desire to cash out an archival find while frustrating the researcher's desire for completeness and depth. Next, it moves on to George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) to demonstrate the affordances of minor character for speculative knowledge, which has previously relied on the protagonist model for representing absent historical subjects. Through the figure of the miser, this essay embraces opacity and superficial intimacies as valuable approaches to depicting minoritzed figures of the past.

Despite their overlapping fin de siècle New Woman communities in London and their correspondence, few scholars have compared the literary works of South African writer Olive Schreiner and Jewish author Amy Levy directly. Reading allegories from Schreiner's first collection, Dreams (1890), in relation to two of Levy's early verse works, “Xantippe” (1881) and Medea (1884), I argue that they both imagine new futures for queer community as an alternative to the oppressive status quo of imperialist England. This paper suggests that Schreiner and Levy, feminist writers with fraught relationships to Englishness, can best be understood as members of a rich community of late Victorian visionaries. When they turn their attention to the forms of allegory and dramatic monologue, Schreiner and Levy are able to explore radical possibilities for gender and community that did not exist in their real lives or their realist fiction. Schreiner and Levy share a deep skepticism about the benefits of marriage, family, and other conventional sources of community, and both offer queer visions of suspended present states or undetermined futures as alternatives.

This essay examines five children’s homemade manuscript magazines and advances an argument that creative collaboration was an important feature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century childhood, especially for middle-class young people associated with artistic circles. Focusing on children connected to the Pre-Raphaelite and Bloomsbury circles, the essay shows how select children formed their own artistic circles, modeled on those of the adults in their lives. The magazines are The Scribbler (1878–80) by the children of William Morris with assistance from the children of Philip Burne-Jones; Our Paper (1870–87) by the children and cousins of the Strachey family; The Gem (1898) by Margaret Keynes with her brothers Geoffrey and John Maynard; the Hyde Park Gate News (1891–95) by the Stephen children, later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; and the Charleston Bulletin (1921–27) by Vanessa Bell’s sons, Julian and Quentin Bell. Through serialized stories, correspondence, competitions, and abundant editorial commentary, child-authors and editors asserted a textual agency as they documented and created collaborative artistic communities.

In this article I look at the collaboration between Dickens and his greatest illustrator, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), in Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and especially Bleak House. In these works, text and image cluster around themes of fallen sexuality, feminine transgression, and the problematic identity of woman as both protagonist and narrator or author. I argue that Browne’s illustrations offer not a counternarrative to Dickens’s but a submerged one, especially in relation to controversial or taboo material. The text and plates work in unison to make manifest what might be present but only subtly telegraphed by Dickens’s words. My piece culminates in speculation about Dickens’s creation of the first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, in Bleak House: was Dickens responding to the proliferation of women-authored texts and women narrators? And were Dickens and Browne signaling in repeated depictions of a faceless Esther that the sex and identity of authorship were mysterious and unsettlingly mutable?

Verney Lovett Cameron (1844–1894) has now lapsed into relative obscurity, but in the late nineteenth century he was among the premiere British explorers, having established his credentials by completing a transcontinental African expedition (1872–76) from present-day Tanzania to Angola. This article, however, focuses on Cameron's status as the most prolific of a range of explorers who turned to the affordances of prose fiction. Imaginative literature provided supplements or alternatives to the expeditionary narrative that operated outside the parameters of institutional science and were not regulated by the same protocols. Drawing on Gérard Genette's narrative taxonomy of the “sequel” and the “serious transposition,” I argue that Cameron's fiction extended his preoccupations with “commercial geography” and private enterprise while also opening the way to surprising alternative conceptualizations of geographical travel. The Adventures of Herbert Massey (1887) uses fictional adventure to invite capitalist venture and specifically to advertise East Africa as amenable to administration by chartered company. The highly esoteric plot of The Queen's Land (1886), by contrast, offers a geographical allegory that at once celebrates the explorer's expertise and casts expeditions as the source of secret knowledge.

The word “thug” entered the common English language in a slew of texts published in London across the 1830s. These works—narrative accounts as well as social histories—cataloged the so-called cult of Indian thugs, a newly “discovered” band of highway robbers believed to operate throughout the Indian subcontinent. This essay traces a literary and cultural history of these representations; yet, I argue, many of their roots are to be found less in Indian social history than in the existing discursive structures of London. In particular, medico-literary frameworks of sensibility—in existing use to construct and mediate metropolitan sensationalism—came, consequentially, to inform both these imperial representations and the associated conceptualizations of national boundaries.

This article places the nearly forgotten local tour guides at the forefront of the studies of Victorian travel and travel writing on semicolonial China, showing how mediating agents shaped and disrupted cross-cultural writing and history with their relational identities. It contextualizes British and American travel writing on the Five Hundred Genii Temple (in Chinese, the Hualin Temple) from 1849 to 1912 within the intertwined relations between travel writers and guides, in the local socio-spatial condition of Guangzhou (then Canton) and under the travel-to-tourism transition in China. The role played by earlier foreign expatriate guides shifted from introducers to coordinators, leading to travelers’ nuanced local understandings that challenged the temple’s presumed otherness. Later authoritative Cantonese guides manipulated local interactions, reviving stereotypical images among the tourists. The guides appropriated metropolitan baggage of the guided in different ways, cowriting the travel writing and the cross-cultural history it implied. Being mediating agents in the travel as a process of encounter with otherness, the guides significantly altered the encounter while sometimes becoming themselves the focal Other in the writing.

Focusing on famine novels by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope and drawing upon Sianne Ngai's account of aesthetic categories, this article questions how the “interesting,” as an aesthetic category, accommodates cultural difference and distance, on one hand, and demonstrates how material interests shape and delimit the expansion of the public sphere, on the other. It argues that Irish novels present Ireland as aesthetically interesting insofar as it differs from England—suggesting strangeness, peculiarity, unpredictability. Yet including Ireland in a vision of a shared public tends to require the opposite—the assimilation of Irish people into British interests—rendering Ireland conventional and familiar. In other words, the strangeness or novelty that makes Ireland aesthetically interesting is the very thing that prevents Irish people from being incorporated into the liberal idea of a public or a vision of British public interest.

This article examines the significance of Christina Rossetti’s caregiving responsibilities and suggests that the relationship between caring and writing is a central, if critically neglected, concern of her poetics. I focus on two periods in Rossetti’s life to show how her creative practice was shaped by her duties as a carer, and vice versa. In the 1840s, when the adolescent Rossetti suffers a breakdown while caring for her father, Gabriele, her physician, Dr. Charles Hare, helps her find solace in self-reflection and writing poetry. Forty years later, Rossetti revisits Hare’s holistic approach when looking after her mother and aunts. During this period, she produces Time Flies, the experimental, hybrid form of which addresses and accommodates her struggles to balance writing and caring. I conclude by arguing that Rossetti’s efforts to live and write with divided attention provide fresh opportunities for exploring the connections between domestic labor and creativity. As well as endorsing Talia Schaffer’s call for “a literary criticism that is predicated on care,” I propose that writing as an act of care has implications beyond the academy: I end with a short discussion of the ongoing poetry workshops for carers that were directly inspired by my research on Christina Rossetti.

This paper argues that recategorizing Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) as humane children’s literature exposes a nineteenth-century humane education that was based in human exceptionalism, while the narratives also push for a conception of subjectivity that would include the child and nonhuman-animal. The Alice books overturn the popular nineteenth-century views that children were inferior British subjects and that nonhumans lacked subjectivity altogether (even as this era saw an upsurge in legal protections for children and animals alike). I argue that Carroll’s work satirizes, not just children’s literature, but humane children’s literature, imagining a revised form of humane education that resisted a speciesist indoctrination of the Victorian child. In the Alice books, humane education leads to positive interspecies relationships and provides children and animals with opportunities to model a robust humane framework for Victorian adult society, ultimately pushing for a view of children and animals not as subordinate to their adult (human) counterparts but as autonomous beings not lacking in subjectivity.

Margaret Marshall Saunders's best-selling novel Beautiful Joe (1893) has long been indexed as anthropomorphic children's literature. This article examines the novel to illuminate the connection between nineteenth-century literature and animal-focused research, including studies of the science of the mind. My analysis seeks to coalesce what I see as neighboring discourses, both historical and contemporary, in literature and science about what it means to be a thinking, feeling “self.” In doing so, I reveal how Saunders's novel maps out the stakes of this impasse as consequential to literary criticism and the wider culture through its subject matter's entanglement with questions of consciousness, anthropomorphism, and representation.

This cluster of short essays discusses Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel and Sexual Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s 2023 Subsequent Book Prize, along with a response from the author.

This short essay considers Kathy Psomiades’s recent book, Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology and the Novel, from a feminist perspective.

Primitive Marriage analyzes the conjectural history installed in Victorian anthropology and taken up by novelists, in which sex drives a civilizational progress from domination and force to liberal relations of exchange, contract, and consent. Kathy Psomiades’s act of critical reflection doubles fin-de-siècle anthropology’s reflexive turn upon its own investments in symbol and representation. Her argument models an ethically and politically responsible criticism that restores the difference of past cultural formations, viewed as unfinished, potential, and manifold in their bearing on our present.

This essay considers the contributions that Primitive Marriage makes to psychoanalytic theory and the history of sexuality. It also explores the ways that Kathy Psomiades’s emphasis on the Victorian anthropology of marriage complicates our understanding of the histories of structuralism and critical theory in the present.

Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage argues that Victorian thinkers used consent as the turning point of history, changing our reading of the marriage plot.

This essay describes the elaborative model of knowledge production that is both the topic of Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage and its method. The annotative procedure of (as Psomiades puts it) “adding” to what has come before is dialectical insofar as it understands any concept to emerge from the historical conditions enabling it; it is collaborative insofar as it links thinking agents across bounds of difference; and it is political in that it offers to locate the preconditions for thought in time but then find supplements, blank spots—openings for change. The essay closes with a biographical example of this model in action, in a scene of feminist mentorship from the early 2000s.