bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
SKIPPING YEARS AND SCRIBAL ERRORS
Authors: Smith Timothy J.
Published: December 2002

Adrián Recinos's correlation of Kaqchikel Maya
and Spanish dates in the Annals of the Kaqchikels contains
numerous errors, and there are several scribal and calculation
errors in how both the 260-day and 400-day Kaqchikel Maya calendars
were used within the manuscript. These are dating problems that
stem from errors by the scribes in their attempt to adapt to
a European counting and documentation system and their inexperience
with the Kaqchikel Maya calendars. In addition, unique citation
marks and two scribal errors shed light on the existence of
earlier documents and subsequent effects on the later time counts
of the Kaqchikel Maya calendar system. This paper adjusts the
previous correlation by Recinos and extends it from 1570 until
1603. Moreover, by highlighting and correcting the internal
errors, this paper offers a caveat to scholars when reconstructing
the histories, events, and social relations of past Mesoamerican
peoples and scripts without regard for internal errors.
VOLCANISM AND MESOAMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY
Authors: Gill Richardson B. , Keating Jerome P.
Published: December 2002

Drought and drought-induced famine are recurring phenomena
in Mesoamerica that have devastated populations in the region
repeatedly during the past two millennia. Although it is
counterintuitive to conceive of the idea that volcanic eruptions
anywhere in the world might affect the lives of people in
Mesoamerica, we examine the reports of drought and famine during
the period A.D. 1440 to 1840 and compare them with
known, large volcanic eruptions. We then apply non-parametric
statistical techniques to determine whether the coincidences
seen between worldwide volcanic eruptions and Mesoamerican drought
within the following two years were due to random chance or
whether there was a direct, mathematically verifiable correlation.
We find a direct correlation to a probability of 56 in 100 million.
We conclude that due to its unique geographical position,
Mesoamerica was repeatedly devastated by drought and subsequent
famine between 1440 and 1840 due to the indirect climatic effects
of large volcanic eruptions that could be located anywhere in
the world.
PALEOLIMNOLOGY OF THE MAYA LOWLANDS
Authors: Brenner Mark , Rosenmeier Michael F. , Hodell David A. , Curtis Jason H.
Published: December 2002

Since the late 1950s, scientists have used sediment cores from
lakes on the Yucatan Peninsula to explore the complex interactions
among climate, environment, and ancient Maya culture. Early
paleolimnological studies generally assumed that late Holocene
climate was invariable. Consequently, paleolimnologically inferred
environmental changes that occurred during the past 3,000 years
or so—for example, forest decline and soil erosion—were
attributed wholly to anthropogenic activities such as land
clearance for agriculture and construction. Recent high-resolution,
proxy-based paleoclimate records from continental and insular
sites around the Caribbean Sea contradict the assumption of
late Holocene climate stability. Instead, these core data suggest
that regional drying began about 3,000 years ago and that the
past three millennia were characterized by variable moisture
availability. Paleoclimate inferences from Lakes Chichancanab
and Punta Laguna, northern Yucatan Peninsula, indicate that
drought events over the past 2,600 years were cyclical. These
dry events, thought to have been driven by solar forcing, appear
to have occurred approximately every two centuries (about 208
years). The driest period of the late Holocene occurred between
A.D. 800 and 1000, coincident with the Classic Maya
Collapse. We review the history of paleolimnological studies
in the Maya Lowlands, discuss the difficulty of differentiating
climatic signals from anthropogenic signals in late Holocene
lake sediment profiles, and assess current understanding of
past climate changes in the region based on regional lacustrine
sediment studies.
“DAMS” ON THE CANDELARIA
Authors: Siemens Alfred H. , Graham José Angel Soler , Hebda Richard , Heimo Maija
Published: December 2002

Much has been learned from the basin of the Candelaria River,
Campeche, Mexico: the fabric of a densely settled pre-Historic
landscape, including impressive ceremonial centers; the logistics
of an ancient entrepôt; the process of exploitation of
dyewood and chicle in historic times; as well as the
doubtful results of the mid-twentieth-century colonization of
an “empty” forested basin. It also yielded the first
evidence of more or less intensive pre-Hispanic wetland agriculture
in the Maya region and the remains of a profuse network of fluvial
transportation from prehistoric times to the present. This article
presents recent evidence regarding the management of the river
system itself by means of barriers, or “dams,” which
facilitated agriculture in the wetlands upstream and extensive
canoe travel. These structures seem to be elaborations or
imitations of the numerous natural barriers already in the stream.
Two models help explain context and function. It has become
apparent that the human interventions into the wetlands and
the river system are to be seen less as great attainments of
civilization than as fairly desperate expedients in the face
of climate change.
CLIMATE AND TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AT KAMINALJUYU, GUATEMALA
Authors: de Hatch Marion Popenoe , Ponciano Erick , Barrientos Q. Tomás , Brenner Mark , Ortloff Charles
Published: December 2002

During the years 2000 and 2001, a project was carried out to
determine the paleoclimate in the Valley of Guatemala. There
were two main objectives: (1) to compare and contrast the Highland
data with that already obtained from the Maya Lowlands and the
Caribbean region; and (2) to understand the relationship between
climate and the disappearance of lakes and irrigated agriculture
at the archaeological site of Kaminaljuyu in the Valley of
Guatemala. Sediment cores have been recovered from Lake Amatitlan
and the extinct Lake Miraflores associated with Kaminaljuyu.
The samples have been transported to the United States for
radiocarbon dating and for analysis of microfossils and pollen
content. The paper summarizes the work and the results of the
analysis obtained to the present.
POLLEN EVIDENCE FOR CLIMATIC VARIABILITY AND CULTURAL
DISTURBANCE IN THE MAYA LOWLANDS
Authors: Leyden Barbara W.
Published: December 2002

Palynology provides a record of past environmental change in
the Maya Lowlands. The underlying principles are simple, but,
as with all proxies, there are limitations. During the late
glacial period, environmental change was governed by climate,
which was cooler and much drier and supported sparse temperate
vegetation. The early Holocene epoch was warmer and very wet
in the southern Lowlands when mesic tropical forests predominated,
while the northern Yucatan Peninsula was edaphically dry until
eustatic sea level rose. The modern distributions of plant
associations and climatic gradients were established at the
end of the early Holocene. Climatic variability continued
throughout the Holocene. However, the ability of palynology
to identify climatic events is hindered after the Maya became
numerous in the Lowlands. Then, multidisciplinary studies provide
a better interpretation of events, especially during the late
Holocene. Pollen records poorly reflect cyclical droughts seen
in isotopic records, as natural vegetation has adapted to these
fluctuations.
DATING THE RISE AND FALL OF XUNANTUNICH, BELIZE
Authors: LeCount Lisa J. , Yaeger Jason , Leventhal Richard M. , Ashmore Wendy
Published: December 2002

This article presents the chronological framework used to
reconstruct the political history of the ancient Lowland Maya
site of Xunantunich in the upper Belize River valley. Extensive
excavations from 1991 to 1997 by the Xunantunich Archaeological
Project produced the ceramic, architectural, and epigraphic
data needed to place the site within a temporal context. Refinement
of the Barton Ramie ceramic chronology was the first step toward
clarifying the Xunantunich chronology. Seriation of well-known
Spanish Lookout types and modes from stratified deposits
established a framework for understanding Late and Terminal
Classic assemblages. Twenty-two radiocarbon samples place these
ceramic complexes in absolute time. Obsidian hydration and masonry
techniques were found to be less reliable chronological markers.
The results indicate that Xunantunich emerged as a regional
center during the Samal (A.D. 600–670) and
Hats' Chaak (A.D. 670–780) phases of the
Late Classic period. Arguably, this rapid growth and florescence
was initiated under the auspices of nearby Naranjo. Although
the polity achieved political autonomy in the following Tsak'
phase (A.D. 780–890) of the Terminal Classic
period, civic construction diminished and rural populations
declined until the site collapsed sometime during the late ninth
or early tenth century.
LOS MAYAS Y EL NIÑO
Authors: Messenger Lewis C.
Published: December 2002

During the spring of 1998, an El Niño event produced
harsh drought conditions in much of Mexico, including the Maya
area. Similar events surely occurred in the distant past. This
paper reports on investigation of chronological correlations
between El Niño event sequences as suggested by glacial
ice-core data from Quelccaya in the Peruvian Andes,
historical-severity-ranked El Niño event sequences, and
historical drought documentation for the Maya area. Positive
correlations between Andean ice-core data sets and historical
sequences were expected to provide evidence for earlier discrete
El Niño event sequences as far back as A.D.
470 that could be used as proxy data to reconstruct annual El
Niño events affecting southern Mesoamerica, including
the Maya Classic through Postclassic periods. Correlations of
these data sets proved inconclusive, suggesting the need for
alternative approaches toward reconstructing discrete El
Niño sequences for the Maya area.
AUTHORSHIP, THE BRONTËS, AND FRASER’S MAGAZINE: “COMING FORWARD” AS AN AUTHOR IN EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND
Authors: Bock Carol A.
Published: December 2002

UNDER THE DIRECTION OF ITS FIRST EDITOR, William Maginn, Fraser’s Magazine purveyed popular images of literary life in the 1830s through its Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters — Daniel Maclise’s engravings of contemporary literary figures accompanied by Maginn’s irreverent textual commentary — and through humorous depictions of the supposed staff meetings of “The Fraserians” themselves (figure 1), whom Miriam Thrall described as “care-free scholars, who laughed so heartily, and drank so deeply, and wrote so vehemently around their famous editorial table” (16). Composed by Maginn in imitation of Blackwood’s wildly successful Noctes Ambrosianae, which he had helped to write prior to the founding of Fraser’s in 1830, these imaginary meetings of London literati present a comic conception of authorship as a clubby activity, rebelliously bohemian and exclusively male. Patrick Leary’s 1994 essay on the actual management of Fraser’s as a literary business demonstrates just how inaccurate these highly fictitious accounts were and thereby contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of authorship in the 1830s. But if we are examining the influence Fraser’s had on its contemporary readers, then the facts of literary life which Leary discovers “beyond the imagery” of the magazine may be less important than the fictions which such representations of authorship communicated (107).
MUCH MORE THAN AN ANTIFEMINIST: ELIZA LYNN LINTON’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE RISE OF VICTORIAN POPULAR JOURNALISM
Authors: Broomfield Andrea L.
Published: December 2002

IT IS DIFFICULT TO DISCUSS the Victorian women’s rights movement and the antifeminist backlash which ensued without mentioning Eliza Lynn Linton’s contribution. Known primarily as the author of the notorious Saturday Review essay, “The Girl of the Period” (1868), Linton was and has been viewed primarily as an essayist who verbally lashed middle-class, progressive women. As late as the 1880s and 1890s, she maintained an active role in the woman-question debate, publishing her “Wild Women” essays, writing a New Woman novel, The New Woman in Haste and At Leisure, and reissuing her Girl of the Period (G.O.P) essays in volume form. Linton scholars have been particularly intrigued by the discrepancies between Linton’s emancipated lifestyle and the restricted one she advocated for other women. How could the first salaried woman journalist in England maintain such a hostile attitude towards her professionally inclined cohorts? More significantly, how could a woman who wrote one of the most radical, protofeminist novels of her time, Realities (1851), suddenly shift to promoting women’s subjection? Various, compelling answers have been offered to such questions. Vineta Colby, in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, and Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets, and William Veeder in The Woman Question. Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 contend that the contradictions between Linton’s lifestyle and her antifeminist essays mirror Victorian England’s own contradictory attitudes regarding gender relations.1
“A GREAT PART TO PLAY”: GENDER, GENRE, AND LITERARY FAME IN GEORGE MOORE’S A MUMMER’S WIFE
Authors: Masters Joellen
Published: December 2002

An actor is one who repeats a portion of a story invented by another.

— George Moore, “Mummer-Worship” (1891)

THE COMPLEXITIES OF GEORGE MOORE’S CHARACTER, his reactions to Victorian life, and his experimentation with literary styles and genres make him a persistently marginal, albeit intriguing, character in literary studies. “[H]is best work,” Lloyd Fernando has observed, “rests to this day in an artistic as well as social limbo which resists complete definition” (10). A Mummer’s Wife (1885), his second novel, has been studied for Moore’s debt to French novelists, in particular Flaubert, or for the author’s reaction to the British circulating libraries’ power.1 In response to controversy over A Mummer’s Wife’s perceived crudeness, Moore claimed “I have a great part to play — I am fighting that Englishman [sic] may exercise a right which they formerly enjoyed, that of writing freely and sanely” (qtd. in Hone 114), even appointing himself “un ricochet de Zola en Angleterre.”2 Without exception then, author and scholars regard A Mummer’s Wife as a transitional work, the book that brought naturalism into the British tradition. The novel, however, suspended in that artistic and social limbo, has not come under scrutiny for additional and alternative readings.3
GAY-RELATED THEMES IN THE FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE
Authors: Duffy John-Charles
Published: December 2002

IT IS A CRITICAL COMMONPLACE that homosexuality — or, to use a more common term of the period, “male love” — appears as a theme in certain of Oscar Wilde’s works.1 It is also a critical commonplace that many Victorian readers were aware of this fact.2 Scant attention, however, has been given to homosexual themes in Wilde’s first book, his 1888 collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which he supplemented in 1891 with a second collection, A House of Pomegranates. The lack of critical attention is surprising, considering that the fairy tales not only mark the beginning of Wilde’s “reputation as an author” (Ellmann 299), but were written in the wake of his first homosexual experience — with Robert Ross in 1886 — a coincidence which gives us grounds to expect, or at least suspect, the presence of homosexual themes.3
TEETH IN VICTORIAN ART
Authors: Sonstroem David
Published: December 2002

IF JOURNAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ERAS reflect their times truly, Victorians and their predecessors did not manage their faces as we do ours. We of the twenty-first century grin or grimace without restraint, but the Victorians checked the impulse to show their teeth. When we engage in an unguarded smile, our show of teeth is intended and taken to mean merely that we are in good spirits or good company. Pictorial evidence indicates that when the Victorians did likewise, the expression held other meaning.
“THE INEFFACEABLE CURSE OF CAIN”: RACE, MISCEGENATION, AND THE VICTORIAN STAGING OF IRISHNESS
Authors: Boltwood Scott
Published: December 2002

THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY both the English popular and scientific communities increasingly argued for a distinct racial difference between the Irish Celt and the English Saxon, which conceptually undermined the Victorian attempt to form a single kingdom from the two peoples. The ethnological discourse concerning Irish identity was dominated by English theorists who reflect their empire’s ideological necessity; thus, the Celt and Saxon were often described as racial siblings early in the nineteenth century when union seemed possible, while later descriptions of the Irish as members of a distant or degenerate race reflect the erosion of public sympathy caused by the era of violence following the failed revolt of 1848. Amid this deluge of scientific discourse, the Irish were treated as mute objects of analysis, lacking any opportunity for formal rejoinder; nonetheless, these essentially English discussions of racial identity and Irishness also entered into the Irish popular culture.
GEORGE ELIOT AND THE COLONIES
Authors: Henry Nancy
Published: December 2002

Women are occasionally governors of prisons for women, overseers of the poor, and parish clerks. A woman may be ranger of a park; a woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.

— Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854)

ON OCTOBER 5, 1860, GEORGE HENRY LEWES VISITED a solicitor in London to consult about investments. He wrote in his journal: “[The Solicitor] took me to a stockbroker, who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly. For £1825 she gets £1900 worth of stock guaranteed 5%” (qtd. in Ashton, Lewes 210). Thus Marian Evans, called Polly by her close friends, known in society as Mrs. Lewes and to her reading public as George Eliot, became a shareholder in British India. Whether or not Eliot thought of buying stock as taking part in the government of a great empire, as her friend Barbara Bodichon had written in 1854, the 5% return on her investment was a welcome supplement to the income she had been earning from her fiction since 1857. From 1860 until her death in 1880, she was one of a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.1 Lewes’s journals for 1860–1878 and Eliot’s diaries for 1879–80 list dividends from stocks in Australia, South Africa, India, and Canada. These include: New South Wales, Victoria, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town Rail, Colonial Bank, Oriental Bank, Scottish Australian, Great Indian Peninsula, Madras. The Indian and colonial stocks make up just less than half of the total holdings. Other stocks connected to colonial trade (East and West India Docks, London Docks), domestic stocks (the Consols, Regents Canal), and foreign investments (Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and Ft. Wayne) complete the portfolio.2
THE JUNGLE OF EDEN: KIPLING, WOLF BOYS, AND THE COLONIAL IMAGINATION
Authors: Hotchkiss Jane
Published: December 2002

THE IDYLLIC FREEDOM OF THE CHILD OF NATURE was a popular notion in both the Romantic and Victorian periods. But the wild child, or what we might call the child of nature taken to extremes, stirs the imagination in deeper ways. This is the child represented as radically orphaned, existing outside of language, and alienated from human social bonds; yet it establishes bonds with the natural world that mimic human object relations and thus suggests an oceanic dyadic connectedness with the non-human. Linking the idea of wildness with the idea of child, the nineteenth-century adult imagination generates a figure of “danger and desire” (1.472), to appropriate Wordsworth’s evocative phrase, one which represents both impossible connection and irremediable alienation.
CASTLE, COFFIN, STOMACH: DRACULA AND THE BANALITY OF THE OCCULT
Authors: Holden Philip
Published: December 2002

Fools, Fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?

— Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Art is completion; not merely a history of endeavour.

— Stoker, Personal Reminiscences (1906)

“HE CAN, WHEN ONCE HE FIND HIS WAY,” says Van Helsing of Dracula, “come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound” (211; ch. 18). Recent criticism has claimed similar powers for Stoker’s text, and its relationship to late-Victorian social formations. A wide territory has been staked out. Moving beyond earlier universalizing Freudian readings, Carol Senf sees the anxiety the novel expresses about gender roles as indicative of Stoker’s difficulty in accepting the rise of the New Woman. Talia Schaffer and Christopher Craft read the homosocial relations in the novel in the light of sexological discourses of inversion and the emergence of the homosexual as a “type of life” (Foucault 43); Stephen Arata, noting Stoker’s frequent use of racial metaphors, has seen the text as expressive of a “reverse colonization” in which “the spectacle of the primitive and the atavistic” (“Occidental Tourist” 624) is brought back to a town house near Piccadilly Circus, the hub of the empire.
“THE LOW, VAGUE HUM OF NUMBERS”: THE MALTHUSIAN ECONOMIES OF JANE EYRE
Authors: Schlossberg Linda
Published: December 2002

JANE EYRE, CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S QUINTESSENTIAL NOVEL of “hunger, rebellion, and rage” (34),1 has been in recent years the subject of a number of important critical discussions about food, privation, and the social production of the female bourgeois body. These analyses, generally indebted to the theories of social practice and disciplinary individualism Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish, tend to focus on issues of anorexia, female desire, and women’s agency, reading Jane’s intriguing concerns with food as either a rejection of adult female sexual development or as an articulation of other, more abstract desires for psychic or intellectual fulfillment (Hoelever, Michie).2 Although it seems inevitable that this “cult text of feminism” (Spivak 243) would produce such readings, I wish, in this essay, to shift our focus slightly, to suggest that the novel’s obsessive circlings around the issues of food and hunger are centered not so much around the nurturance and development of a specifically female or feminine body, but rather around the peculiar fate of the often ungendered3 yet extraordinarily vulnerable child’s body — a body largely understood, in nineteenth-century social discourse, to be strangely perishable and infinitely prone to danger and decay. Brontë’s frightening portraits of childhood starvation and neglect in the Lowood School chapters of Jane Eyre can be read as dramatizing the laws of Malthusian economics, speaking powerfully to a range of mid-nineteenth-century social anxieties regarding the relationship between the overproduction of unwanted children and the threat of mass starvation on a national scale.
“WITHOUT THE CAMP”: LEPROSY AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITING
Authors: Edmond Rod
Published: December 2002

FOUCAULT WAS PROBABLY RIGHT WHEN he argued in the first chapter of Madness and Civilization that the asylum replaced the lazar house at the end of the Middle Ages, but he exaggerated in claiming that leprosy had disappeared from the western world. The decline of leprosy in early modern Europe did not mean that fear of it vanished or that Europe lost all contact with the disease. From the sixteenth century it became involved in the debate about the origin of syphilis, which at first was widely believed to be a new form of leprosy. A later, converse theory claimed that leprosy was a common terminal stage of syphilis, particularly in hot climates (Leprosy in India 353). This was given circulation and respectability at the turn of the nineteenth century by William Jones when he wrote that “The Persian, or venereal, fire generally ends in this malady” (qtd. in Crook and Guiton 91). The Collected Works of this distinguished Orientalist were published in 1799 and widely discussed. Britain’s steady colonial expansion in the late eighteenth century had brought renewed contact with leprosy and the consequent fear of its reintroduction into Europe. Although the disease had remained available to writers as a figure for horror throughout the early modern period, it was to take on renewed force in the century or so following the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798).
FIN-DE-SIÈCLE WORK ON VICTORIAN AESTHETICISM
Authors: Loesberg Jonathan
Published: December 2002

IN MASCULINE DESIRE:The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, his study of the role of male same-sex attraction among Victorian aestheticist writers, Richard Dellamora refers to Elaine Showalter’s claim that Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of a series of writers who tried to reclaim male literary dominance from women writers in the wake of George Eliot’s death in 1880. Dellamora proposes instead what he thinks a more likely source of creative anxiety: “Insofar as he may appear at times to regard literary creativity as a male prerogative, his anxieties are better referred to a celibate homosocial environment than to the creative ascendancy of Victorian women writers” (56). But these two anxieties may not be entirely separate. Recent critical studies have shown that the mid-Victorian novel, whether written by women or men, was a form dominated by domestic and marriage plots, by the depiction of the bourgeois family and the construction of gender roles as principles of social regulation. Thus the emergence from the shadow of Eliot and the turning of aestheticist literature and art toward various alternative constructions of gender and desire — not merely new claims of masculine prerogative but also articulations by women writers of positions resistant to Victorian gender regularities — would be intimately connected.
CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELISTS
Authors: Karl Frederick R.
Published: December 2002

IT IS TIME to assess where contemporary biographies of Victorian novelists are heading. With two more books about George Eliot, still others on Jane Austen, and another on Anthony Trollope, we see redundancy everywhere. As for other major figures, the Brontës have finally quieted down with Juliet Barker’s monumental biography; Dickens has settled in with Peter Ackroyd and Fred Kaplan, and whoever is waiting in the wings for another stab at his life is probably wise to await the completion of the magnificent Oxford University Press edition of the letters, now passing Volume 11.
ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR 1998
Authors: Donaldson Sandra M. , Bisignano Dominic , Brotton Melissa
Published: December 2002

The following abbreviations appear in this year’s bibliography:

BSN Browning Society Notes. DAI Dissertation Abstracts International. N&Q Notes and Queries. NCL Nineteenth Century Literature. RES Review of English Studies. VLC Victorian Literature and Culture. VP Victorian Poetry. VS Victorian Studies

An asterisk* indicates that we have not seen the item. Cross references with citation numbers between 51 and 70 followed by a colon (e.g., C68:) refer to William S. Peterson’s Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography, 1951–1970 (New York: Browning Institute, 1974); higher numbers refer to Robert Browning: A Bibliography 1830–1950, compiled by L. N. Broughton, C. S. Northup, and Robert Pearsall (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1953).
CHARLES KINGSLEY, THE ROMANTIC LEGACY, AND THE UNMAKING OF THE WORKING-CLASS INTELLECTUAL
Authors: Gottlieb Evan M.
Published: December 2002

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

—Percy Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”

THESE WORDS, written in 1821, celebrate the figure of the poet as leader and prophet.1 By noting that this position is “unacknowledged,” however, Shelley intimates that the Industrial Revolution sweeping Britain threatens to shrink the political and social relevance of poets. While Shelley makes no mention of class distinctions in “A Defence of Poetry,” had he paused to consider the relative status of the poet in class terms, he would probably have admitted that his era’s working-class versifiers were, with a few exceptions, the most unacknowledged poets of all.
THOMAS CARLYLE, CHARTISM, AND THE IRISH IN EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND
Authors: Swift Roger
Published: December 2002

Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns.

—Chartism

THUS WROTE THOMAS CARLYLE in his famous long pamphlet Chartism, published in December 1839. But what moved Carlyle, the intellectual hero of the age, to direct attention in Chartism to the Irish presence in the early Victorian city? Why did he present the Irish in England in such negative terms? Was his analysis correct? And what was the wider significance of his interpretation? These, as Carlyle might have said, are measurable questions and they form the essential framework of this paper. Yet it is impossible to respond to these questions without first examining the contemporary social, economic, and political contexts within which Chartism was written; Carlyle’s development as an historian in the early 1830s; and the purpose of Chartism, including the chapter on the Irish entitled “The Finest Peasantry in the World.”
INSTRUCTIVE SUFFICIENCY: RE-READING THE GOVERNESS THROUGH AGNES GREY
Authors: Regaignon Dara Rossman
Published: December 2002

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, a governess was the primary educator of male and female children in a middle-class household; particularly by virtue of her work educating girls through their mid-teens, the governess simultaneously effected and disrupted the transparent transmission of class and gender identity between generations of middle-class women. Recent scholarship has de-emphasized this pedagogical function in its readings of the figure.1 Discussion has centered, instead, on the ways in which the governess represented a crisis for early Victorian definitions of bourgeois femininity (which centered on middle-class women’s financial dependence and apparent leisure) because she was a middle-class woman who earned her own living. But to read the figure of the Victorian governess through Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is to see that she troubled bourgeois hegemony because of her job. I contend that the governess disturbed the early Victorians not only because she blurred the boundary between the separate spheres, but also because she dramatized the potentially illimitable effects of education. When you hire someone to teach your children, how do you ensure that she is teaching what you wish and as you wish?
“THE SOVEREIGN PEOPLE ARE IN A BEASTLY STATE”: THE BEER ACT OF 1830 AND VICTORIAN DISCOURSE ON WORKING-CLASS DRUNKENNESS
Authors: Mason Nicholas
Published: December 2002

I

ON JULY 23, 1830, Parliament passed “An Act to permit the general Sale of Beer and Cyder by Retail in England.” Commonly known as the Beer Act of 1830, this law called for a major overhaul of the way beer was taxed and distributed in England and Wales. In place of a sixteenth-century statute that had given local magistrates complete control over the licensing of brewers and publicans, the Beer Act stipulated that a new type of drinking establishment, the beer shop, or beer house, could now be opened by any rate-paying householder in England or Wales (Scotland and Ireland had their own drink laws). For the modest annual licensing fee of two guineas, rate-payers in England could now purchase a license to brew and vend from their own residence.1
VICTORIAN ART HISTORY: RAP 2 UNWRAPPED
Authors: Kestner Joseph A.
Published: December 2002

AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Victorian painting experienced at least one mass media event, so far as circulation is concerned — the appearance of Frederic Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche (1890) on the wall of the drug kingpin in Paul Thomas Anderson’s notorious film Boogie Nights of 1997. As a ferocious deal is going awry, over the desperate dealers looms one of the masterpieces of the Victorian High Renaissance, a commentary through the cool classicism of the late Victorians about the corresponding fin-de-siècle of the lately finished century. It is a stunning moment — perhaps recognized only by historians of British art — but there it is nonetheless. One is to presume that the dealer has acquired the original from the Tate Gallery, since he would never own a copy, let alone a poster! Busboy superstud Mark Wahlberg has brief, violent contact with a masterpiece.
MILLENNIAL VICTORIA
Authors: Booth Alison
Published: December 2002

HAVING SURVIVED THE Y2K HYSTERIA, we may feel we have entered new corridors of one hundred and one thousand years. But it is only in 2001 that the punctilious and historical among us may at last observe a centennial, truly the final year of the past century and the hundredth anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria.1 The Jubilees in the last decades of Victoria’s life, and the ceremonies of international mourning that followed her death, might seem to have said goodbye to all that, but in many ways we are still under the sway of the great queen who lent her name to the age before “the American century.” Our own fin-de-siècle urges us to rediscover the many forms of Victoria that have “been hidden in plain view for a hundred years,” as Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich put it in their co-edited collection of essays, Remaking Queen Victoria (1).2 While North American and British feminist studies have dwelt among Victorian ways since the 1970s — with implications that I will consider below — the queen herself has recently commanded critical attention that might seem, like so many features of Victoria’s public performance, out of proportion. Yet that excess, like our obeisance to the arbitrary power of the calendar, seems to be the very stuff of imagined community and ideological construction, and thus worth watching in action. In any case, when feminist literary critics such as Adrienne Munich, Margaret Homans, and Gail Turley Houston
MAKING WHAT WILL SUFFICE: CARLYLE’S FETISHISM
Authors: Lee Yoon Sun
Published: December 2002

CARLYLE AS FETISHIST: this oldest of charges against Carlyle holds the key to his new importance as cultural critic. Carlyle’s earliest reviewers singled out for disapproval the indiscriminate admiration Carlyle seemed to feel for idols chosen according to an obscure logic of personal need or affinity. In the Quarterly Review of September 1840, for example, William Sewell1 complains:
WILDE’S SALOMÉ AND THE AMBIGUOUS FETISH
Authors: Fernbach Amanda
Published: December 2002

Castration . . . is the seminal fantasy of the decadent imagination.

— Charles Bernheimer, “Fetishism and Decadence: Salomé’s Severed Heads”

When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and — for reasons familiar to us — does not want to give up.

— Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”

DESPITE FREUD’S AUTHORITATIVE DECLARATION, contemporary critical theory deploys a conceptual plasticity of the fetish, which refutes the notion of any single narrative of origin.1 Many recent discussions of the fetish have pointed to the limits of the explanatory powers of classical psychoanalysis2 and have been critical of the theoretical importance invested in a narrative of causation which figures women’s bodies as “lacking” or mutilated, according to “the fact” of their “castration.” Focusing on Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, this essay will argue that despite Bernheimer’s claim,3 the Freudian fable of castration need not be taken as the singular, phallic, “seminal fantasy of the decadent imagination.” To do so merely reiterates the gender and sexual hierarchies of classical psychoanalysis and denies the ambiguity of some fetishistic imagery produced in the fin de siècle.
SHIRLEY: REFLECTIONS ON MARRYING MOORES
Authors: Wilt Judith
Published: December 2002

“‘The Omnipresent,’ said a Rabbi, ‘is occupied in making marriages.’ The levity of the saying lies in the ear of him who hears it, for by making marriages the speaker meant all the wondrous combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good and evil.” 1

— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon . . . Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best — making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius, and fetters the dead to the living. . . . All that surrounds him hastens to decay. . . . Your god is a masked Death.”2

— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S FIRST NOVEL found no publisher: her second one brought her editors and readers, money and success, society and scrutiny. With this muchness the subtlest theologian of Haworth Parsonage turned, all shy and fierce and willing, to grapple. Not for nothing is her third novel set in “the Hollows”: not for nothing are the avatars and objects of its quests named “Mo(o)re.” The Work Question, the Woman Question, the Church Question, the Fiction Question — all of these go to the making of Shirley in its plenitude, but at its heart is a metaphysical question, the fusion, the confusion, of “hollow” with “more.”3
SWINBURNE SEPARATES THE MEN FROM THE GIRLS: SENSATIONALISM IN POEMS AND BALLADS
Authors: Seagroatt Heather
Published: December 2002

MR. SWINBURNE, DECLARED THOMAS BAYNES in the Edinburgh Review, is a “poet of what is known as the sensational school of literature.” Swinburne’s predilection for sensuous subject matter, and the premium on physical sensation in his poetry, Baynes argued, produce in the reader neither “ideal pleasures” nor “any purely mental effect,” but a “physical commotion in the frame — a ‘flutter of the blood’” (93–94; 89–90).
EDUCATING BOYS TO BE QUEER: BRADDON’S LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET
Authors: Kushnier Jennifer S.
Published: December 2002

AT THE END OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’SLady Audley’s Secret (1862), her hero- detective Robert Audley marries the near-identical sister of George Talboys, his one close friend since their days at Eton College years before. Throughout the novel, Braddon characterizes Robert as having effeminate mannerisms and a strong longing to be with George. She consciously makes him an alumnus of Eton College, which one contemporary critic cited as a prime example of “characteristic faults and virtues” of the entire public school system (Payne 35). One perceived “fault” of the public schools in particular was that homosexuality and homoeroticism were condoned among the boys, who were later expected to “become” heterosexual upon graduation. But Robert’s homoerotic urges do not disappear with his “purchase” of a heterosexual marriage at the novel’s end.
“UNMAPPED COUNTRY”: UNCOVERING HIDDEN WOUNDS IN DANIEL DERONDA
Authors: Penner Louise
Published: December 2002

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

WITH THESE WORDS THE NARRATOR of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda appears to invite readers to map Gwendolen Harleth’s psyche, to trace its history, the places it has been, and the events that appear to have been, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, erased from her memory. This passage is typical of the way that questions of identity in George Eliot’s last novel seem consistently to reflect emerging Victorian concepts of memory.

Probably as a direct result of the burgeoning interest in the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, we see at mid-century a general trend toward the empirical study of the mind according to the model used in the natural sciences: observation and taxonomical classification. Scientists thus observed the physical attributes and behaviors of individuals and then attempted to classify each within the larger species of humans and their behaviors. From this point, scientists would then speculate about the existence of general categories or even laws governing the functions of the mind. It comes as no surprise, then, that those writing most prolifically on physiology and psychology at mid-century also wrote important tracts about nature study: George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill among others. And, as other critics have noted before me, Eliot includes references to both types of science in her works.1
A SPECULATIVE RESURRECTION: DEATH, MONEY, AND THE VAMPIRIC ECONOMY OF OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
Authors: Scoggin Daniel P.
Published: December 2002

Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it?

— Gaffer Hexam, Our Mutual Friend

WHILE FISHING CORPSES out of the fast-flowing Thames, itself a symbol of death,1 in order to probe their pockets, Gaffer Hexam makes sharp reference to a long-standing distinction regarding the limits of earthly possession. Some of Dickens’s readers would have been quite ready to connect Gaffer’s remarks to Bunyan’s story of Christian’s exodus from the commerce and bustle of the earthly city and his crossing of the river of death that flows before the gates of the celestial city. Others might have considered the riverman’s musings as somehow referring to St. Paul’s saying that “the end of those things [wealth] is death” (qtd. in Welsh 59).2 In the presentation of Gaffer’s ghastly career, however, Dickens points out a dislocation from these earlier views: the riverman desecrates the “muffled human form” he finds just as he truncates (if not turns inside-out) what was once the afterlife’s principal judgment of the use of riches in this lower world (44; bk. 1, ch. 1). According to the text, Gaffer, in sharply dividing spiritual transactions from material ones, and the soul from his or her former possessions, only further mires himself in the “slime and ooze” of the commercial river (43; bk. 1, ch. 1), enabling decay to encroach more aggressively on life.
STEVENSON’S PYJAMAS
Authors: Colley Ann C.
Published: December 2002

Introduction

BURIED AMONG ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S miscellaneous papers at the Beinecke Library (Yale) is a seemingly insignificant tailor’s bill made out to “R. L. Stevenson, Samoa” from Chorley, the tailor in Sydney (Australia). The bill lists such items as “1 pair of white serge tros.,” “1 pair of Bedford Cord riding tros.,” “and 3 pairs of pyjamas” (Figure 3). Not even his biographers have bothered to mention it.
ELEGANT AMAZONS: VICTORIAN RIDING HABITS AND THE FASHIONABLE HORSEWOMAN
Authors: David Alison Matthews
Published: December 2002

There is a delightful feeling when you are well mounted, that those who are casting admiring glances at your horse, will find your dress and “get-up” just as perfect in their way.

— Mrs. Alice Hayes, The Horsewoman, 1893

At no time are the beauties of the female form divine displayed with such witching grace, the faultless flowing lines so attractively posed, the tout ensemble so thoroughly patrician. But if there be one blot in the fair picture, the charm at once vanishes.

— E. Kerr, Riding for Ladies, 1895

THE VICTORIAN SIDESADDLE RIDING HABIT was a paradoxical garment. It was a fashionable anti-fashion statement, masculine and feminine, practical yet alluring. While on horseback, the fair equestrian shunned the lace, frills, and furbelows worn by her pedestrian sisters. Even when the bell-like silhouette produced by the crinoline skirt was at its greatest width, the essence of the horsewoman’s garb was a lean, understated, and almost masculine simplicity. She represented the epitome of cultivated elegance and cut a fine figure in her tailored habit and silk top hat. Clad in her severe attire, the horsewoman became a center of visual attention in Victorian England. Though she graced fewer pages than the traditional fashion plate, she put her stamp on paintings, photographs, and caricatures. Preceded by showy, colorful riding costumes and superseded by breeches, caught between the demands of Victorian femininity and rising feminism, the riding habit and the women who wore it were typical of and unique to their era. The modern horsewoman represents a turning point in the history of female dress. She adopted the first sports costume specifically designed for women and opened the way for the invention of other athletic garments like the bicycling suit. The riding habit’s combination of style and practicality launched the fashion for more gender-neutral, utilitarian garments and heralded the advent of the twentieth-century working woman’s uniform: the tailored suit.
QUAKER DRESS, SEXUALITY, AND THE DOMESTICATION OF REFORM IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
Authors: Keen Suzanne
Published: December 2002

WHY ARE JANE EYRE AND DOROTHEA BROOKE clad by their creators in “Quakerish” garb? The oppositional plainness and simplicity of Quakerish heroines have often been read as signs of classlessness and sexlessness.1 Plain and simple clothing seems, to both Victorian and contemporary eyes, part of the package of reticence, reserve, and repression associated with the evangelical wing of nineteenth-century dissenting sects.2 The typical sociological view of the function of dress within conservative religious groups holds that “strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body” (Arthur 1). The control of female sexuality and the restraint of desire would seem to be the core function of modest clothing. Then the plain dress of some of the liveliest heroines of Victorian fiction presents a puzzle that can be solved only by recuperating the meaning of that clothing for Victorians. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, nineteenth-century novels testify to the way that clothes “always correctly express character” (Feeding the Eye 12), but the meaning of particular articles of clothing or styles can slip away. Accurately reading the characters of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot thus requires careful interpretation of their dress, in this case reversing the conventional reading of their plain, modest, and simple style. This essay argues that Quakerish clothing expresses both a promise of spirited sexuality and an admonition about the class-crossing potential of the respectable female contained within it.
KASHMIR SHAWLS IN MID-VICTORIAN NOVELS
Authors: Daly Suzanne
Published: December 2002

WHEN CLOTH OR CLOTHING made for a specific purpose in one cultural context begins to be produced as a commodity and is appropriated as fashion by a different culture, meanings reverberate on both sides of the transaction. The commercial traffic with India in the nineteenth century brought many such commodities into the homes of the English middle class. Some of these items, and particularly textiles, led a double life, functioning at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as markers of proper Englishness. If mid-Victorian novels may be said to have assisted in circulating and crystallizing, rather than merely reflecting, social norms among their readers, then the regularity with which certain Indian textiles and especially shawls reappear in these novels bespeaks their burgeoning importance both commercially and ideologically.