bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“From Fag to Monitor; Or, Fighting to the Front”: Art and Power in Public School Memoirs
Authors: Gagnier Regenia
Published: October 2008

This paper is intended to suggest how an educational system produced a literary community and discursive practice that represented itself as essentially distinct from the realm of political power. My subject is the foundations in the English Public Schools of the modern British literary community and literary value as we have known it from Romanticism through modernism – value measured by the self-consciousness, introspection, individuality, and putative autonomy that are challenged if not already defeated by the forces of post-modernism. But before examining what happened between Thomas Hughes'sTom Brown's Schooldaysof 1857 and Cyril Connolly'sA Georgian Boyhoodof 1938, I shall provide a brief historical summary for readers unfamiliar with the English public schools.
The Concept of Working-Class Education in Industrial Investigative Reports of the Eighteen-Thirties
Authors: Kestner Joseph A.
Published: October 2008

Steven Marcus has observed, “On any account, the 1830s are a decade of critical importance” (15). The period is prominent in the industrial era for several far-reaching if not entirely satisfactory pieces of legislation, including the Reform Bill of 1832, Althorp's Factory Act of 1833, and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 established the principle of popular election in all corporate boroughs with the exception of London. The decade is marked, as well, by the quantification of social problems, which is represented by the statistical societies founded in Manchester in 1833 and in London in 1834 and by the Journal of the Statistical Society in 1838. These manifestations of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy reflected the shift from cottage to factory production that marked the Industrial Revolution.
Healthy Intercourse: The Beginning of the London Working Men's College
Authors: Reed John R.
Published: October 2008

In 1853, a group of earnest Englishmen proposed an experiment that seemed revolutionary – a college in London specifically for the education of working men. Since there was, at that time, no national program of education for the young in England, this surprising proposal for the education of adults, not in technical skills, but in the traditional liberal arts, was all the more remarkable. And yet the plan succeeded and was praised not only by champions of the working class, but by others as well. Moreover, the success of the Working Men's College seemed simple and direct, quickly achieving the clear-cut scheme according to which it was founded. In fact, in a most fortunate irony, the College survived in spite of its declared principles. It was as much a social as an educational success. Despite its high intellectual ideals, cordiality more than classics kept the London Working Men's College alive.
What the Victorians Knew About Sex
Authors: Kincaid James R.
Published: October 2008

“Victorian Learning on Sex”: nearly every term in this sequence baffles me. I am friendly with “on,” but the others, especially in company with one another, are alien. It is a pitiful thing for a grown-up to admit that he is befuddled by the term “sex,” but I also do not know what “Victorian learning” is or why we are interested in it.
The Language of Discovery: William Whewell and George Eliot
Authors: Preyer Robert O.
Published: October 2008

In 1861 Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) delivered his famous Lectures On the Science Of Language at the Royal Institution in London. Published the following year, this popular and influential volume provided a classical exposition for a widely accepted and comforting account of the role played by language in the creation and subsequent preservation of new knowledge. This view, based largely on German comparative philology, was embraced by George Eliot and G.H. Lewes even though it bore stiking resemblances to the lexical ideas and practise of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and William Whewell (1794–1866), representative figures of an earlier generation of philosophical Idealists – Kantians, admiring commentators on Plato, and both of them powerful defenders of the Anglican Church and Tory traditionalism. There was something about Müller's “great and delightful book” (as George Eliot called it) which appealed to distinguished Victorians of every intellectual stripe. Among the auditors at the Royal Institution were “Germano-Coleridgian” clergymen (Bishop Thirlwall, Dean Stanley F.D. Maurice), poets and philosophers (Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, the Duke of Argyle), and a distinguished group of scientists, headed by Michael Faraday. All were excited and enthusiastic, despite their very different intellectual positions. Linda Dowling suggests why:

Muller's lectures on language … were deeply reassuring. They managed to suggest that even though the new philology had reconstituted language in wholly new terms as a phonetic totality independent of representation and of human control, language somehow remained unchanged in its power to guarantee human identity and value. (“Victorian Oxford” 161)
Logical Writing in the Education of John Stuart Mill: TheAutobiographyand the Privileging of Reason
Authors: Welch Kathleen E.
Published: October 2008

In hisAutobiography, published posthumously in 1873, twenty years after it was first drafted, John Stuart Mill writes a series of logical essays on ideas. The people who appear in the book do so as personifications of these ideas rather than as palpable characters. This writing strategy leads Mill to make ideas rather than people exciting, and this unusual hierarchy makes his autobiography not only a fascinating book but a peculiar one as well. One in fact wishes that Mill had thought of the titleThe Autobiography of an Ideasixty years before his intellectual grandson, Louis Sullivan, used it for his autobiography. Mill composes his autobiography of personified ideas with a series of logical essays on his remarkable education and on his political and philosophical writing. Consequently, deductive writing forms these essays, a kind of writing that is not surprising for a logician and an essayist but rare for an autobiographer.
A Girl in the Bodleian: Mary Ward's Room of Her Own
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: October 2008

Founded in medieval monasticism, the University of Oxford has always been nervous about women on its premises. For six hundred years, the other sex was comprehensively shut out. It was not until 1879 (some time after Cambridge) that a token few female students were admitted at the collegiate enclave of Somerville (Mallet 432). Oxford dons were bound to formal celibacy until the 1870s. And even after the erosion of this rule, women continued to be seen as fatal presences at the university: a fear burlesqued in Max Beerbohm's novel Zuleika Dobson (1911), where the arrival of one sexually desirable girl drives the whole of Oxford's undergraduate population to lemming-like suicide in the Isis.
Democracy and Popular Culture Before Reform
Authors: Butwin Joseph
Published: October 2008

The theatricality of modern politics is an axiom available to every headline writer, every talk show host, and every college professor. National and international politics have become a branch of theater which is a branch of advertising. And most people who bother to note this commonplace complain about it. With the presidency of a movie actor, the headline writers have tended more and more to acknowledge the metaphor that animates their own activity. The press with its words and pictures, the newsreel, and then television have very self-consciously assumed the function of the stage in this century. Politicians step in as its actors while ad agencies produce, and we the people quietly sequestered in our living rooms play an uneasy role as a dispersed and silent audience, the weakest component of a global metaphor that has been with us at least since Shakespeare's time.
Imps, Dames and Principal Boys: Gender Confusion in the Nineteenth-Century Pantomime
Authors: Eigner Edwin M.
Published: October 2008

Two of the most popular forms of culture in the nineteenth century, and perhaps those to which Victorians had access at the earliest stages of their lives, are nursery rhymes and the Christmas pantomimes. The latter were and still remain the most financially successful of English dramatic forms. Indeed, they kept most of the nineteenth-century theatres open, including even the licensed theatres, and nowadays the pantomime accounts for about one-fifth of the live-theatre tickets sold in England every year. The two forms are connected, of course, because so many of the pantomime characters and plots were taken from the nursery tales.
Strategic Self-Centering and the Female Narrator: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese
Authors: Paul Sarah
Published: October 2008

As the first love sonnet sequence written by a woman in English, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese challenged the conventions of amatory poetry when it was published in 1850. The genre, which had always required its female inhabitants to maintain an aloof and icy silence, was not accustomed to female voices. Certainly a speaker like the narrator of Barrett Browning's sonnets, loudly proclaiming her right to adopt postures of adoration and unworthiness toward a male love object, had never before disturbed its rarefied spaces. The radical nature of the work, however, seems to have been lost on its nineteenth-century audience. Victorian readers saw nothing shocking or immodest about the sonnets and actually admired them a great deal, particularly because they seemed, oddly enough, to uphold an idealized model of devout and reticent femininity. Hall Caine called them “essentially feminine in their hyper-refinement, in their intense tremulous spirituality” (310–11), while Eric Robertson wrote that “no woman's heart indeed was ever laid barer to us, but no heart could have laid itself bare more purely” (281). Twelve years later Edmund Gosse spoke of the cycle's “noble dignity,” “stainless harmony,” and “high ethical level of distinguished utterance” (11, 21). Neither these nor any other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century critic saw anything revolutionary in the sequence. Only in the past dozen years have feminist critics re-evaluating Sonnets from the Portuguese discovered within its self-deprecating stanzas an “enterprise of heroinism” asserting a woman's “right” to be the active subject of both poetry and feeling rather than their passive object.
William Rothenstein Reads Browning
Authors: Fowler Rowena
Published: October 2008

William Rothenstein's The Browning Readers (frontispiece) is one painter's tribute to a favorite poet. It also offers a fascinating glimpse of the “idea” of Browning at the turn of the century, a pictorial impression of the atmosphere in which his work was read and of the mood it evoked in his readers. Its original and thoughtful approach to the relationships between reader, writer, artist, and spectator sets it apart from the general run of charming but lightweight variations on the popular theme of women reading and places it, a particularly English example, among the masterpieces of the genre from Corot to Hopper. Together with Rothenstein's other Browning subjects, Porphyria and two paintings from “Parting at Morning,” The Browning Readers contributes to that alternative critical heritage of “paintings from books“ which parallels and supplements the written commentaries of reviewers and literary critics (Altick 248).
The Criminal Body in Victorian Britain: The Case ofThe Ring and the Book
Authors: Gibson Mary Ellis
Published: October 2008

“For the choice of subject we have nothing but condemnation. It is Mr Browning's luck” (Litzinger 331). Thus the reviewer forChamber's Journalin 1869 summed up his reaction to the subject matter of Browning'sThe Ring and the Book. Indeed, this account of Browning's subject has seemed satisfactory to all but the biographically inclined of Browning's critics. Browning's subject—a grisly murder and its attendant trials—can easily enough be explained by reference to his account of discovering his historical sources in Book 1 ofThe Ring and the Bookor by a general discussion of Browning's personal propensity for the criminal or the bizarre. I wish to argue here, however, that Browning's subject was not merely his “luck.” Rather it went to the heart of social concerns and fictional practices in England in the 1860s. I propose, not to offer an exhaustive new reading of the poem, but to show how we can seeThe Ring and the Bookas embedded in Victorian responses to the criminal body. A focus on the body and crime can provide us with a significant new understanding of Browning's poem even as it offers us a new way to view that poem's connections to Victorian culture and to our own.
The Word's Dispersion: Two Letters and a Parchment in Browning's Poetry
Authors: Dupras Joseph A.
Published: October 2008

Scientific and hermeneutic studies, which held the attention of Robert Browning7's contemporaries who were sensitive to Christology, made Scripture and the “book of nature” seem even more inscrutable. A prominent theme in many Browning poems, “How very hard it is to be / A Christian” (Easter-Day, lines 1–2), pertains not only to behavior but also to the influence of spoken, written, or printed discourse on historical and canonical matters. In Karshish's epistle to Abib, Cleon's letter to Protus, and multiple analyses of a parchment concerning St. John's death, Christianity appears not just a religious and cultural phenomenon, but a changing philological and interpretive one affected by “the ineptitude of the time, / And the penman's prejudice” (Christmas-Eve 871–72). For Victorians and later readers, anxious about being on the brink of a post-Christian age and therefore inclined to idealize their ancestors' religious confidence, Browning's portraits of Christianity's first century are a chance to review inherited discursive practices. He represents Christianity's vocal and textual foundations to accentuate “hermeneutics, … how poets find authority and means to communicate in written language and how readers derive meaning from poetic texts … or an event qua text.” (Peterson 363). Browning is less troubled by “higher” or “lower” critics, attuned to the perils of logocentrism, than by nervous religious and literary disciples who understand his poetics no better than they adapt to the altered theological climate.
Legal “Repristination” inThe Ring and the Book
Authors: Rigg Patricia D.
Published: October 2008

For browning, the central issue inThe Ring and the Bookis perception of the finite limits of the human capacity for recognizing truth. For the critical reader, the central issue is perhaps better expressed as Browning'sawarenessof his own capacity for re-creating or “repristinating” the past. Critics have labelled Browning's work as either relativistic or ironic, often using these terms as the poles of a continuum upon which the accuracy of Browning's perceptions might be measured. For example, Robert Langbaum sees relativism as the basis of the poem's associational coherence: “The organized facts are ‘one fact the more.’ The principle of organization is inseparable from the facts because without it the facts would not be knowable. To know anything we must imagine it” (15). W. David Shaw understands irony and relativism to be mutually exclusive (239). He argues that Browning structures his poem by the dialectical irony which arises out of the movement of Guido's guilt and the corresponding movement of Pompilia's innocence. I suggest that relativism and irony come together once one recognizes the close relationship between historicity and fantasy and the rather serious implications this relationship has for the kind of truth Browning suggests his poem specifies. That is, the act of artistic creativity allows the poet to express with freedom intuitive insights into the world of unlimited possibility, or infinity, and indeed, it is for an ever closer approach to the infinite that he or she strives artistically.
The Death of Pan: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Romantic Ego
Authors: Morlier Margaret M.
Published: October 2008

During the past two decades Elizabeth Barrett Browning has become most appreciated for her 1856 feminist epicAurora Leigh, a poem in which she asserted her “highest convictions upon Life and Art.” Before publishingAurora Leigh, however, she said that one of her most important poems was “The Dead Pan.” When she published her two-volume collection ofPoemsin 1844, she insisted that “The Dead Pan” be placed last for emphasis. This poem of thirty-nine stanzas, each ending with some variation of the phrase “Pan is dead,” is often overlooked today in discussions of Barrett Browning's development probably because its theme appears outdated to modern readers. Beginning with a catalogue of classical deities—such as Juno, Apollo, and Cybele—shocked by the crucifixion of Christ, the poem depicts the death of these classical gods along with their representative, Pan. In the final third of the poem they are replaced by the Christian god and his martyred son. Then the refrain “Pan is dead” changes in meaning: no longer the lament of the classical gods, the refrain becomes a joyful proclamation of the Christian poet. On a first reading, “The Dead Pan” seems simply to celebrate orthodox Christianity; it is still generally remembered as a Victorian expression of pietism or, in Douglas Bush's facetious words of 1937, a poem in which the “Greek gods are brought face to face with Christian truth and put to rout” (268).
Browning and Victorian Medievalism
Authors: Taylor Beverly
Published: October 2008

The fascination with the Middle Ages that stimulated Carlyle's Past and Present, Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume, and Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse registered slight effect in Browning's poetry. Perhaps alone of Victorian poets, Browning recorded no impressions of Malory's Morte Darthur — which appeared in three separate editions early in the century and not only inspired the Laureate's magnum opus and the Pre-Raphaelite murals in the Oxford Union, but nearly prompted Morris to found a chivalric order before he alighted on the more practical scheme for a furniture company. Whereas Browning used specifically medieval settings and characters in two early unsuccessful works, Sordello and The Return of the Druses, he later returned to the Middle Ages in only a small number of poems. Though Arthur Symons praised Browning for having “distilled the very essence of the Middle Ages,” the claim that “there is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge” holds true for the Renaissance and later periods far more than for the Middle Ages. Even though his medieval interests, compared to those of his contemporaries, seem slight, Browning's perception and uses of the Middle Ages constitute an intriguing and rather neglected facet of the many-sided phenomenon, Victorian medievalism. To understand his sense of the Middle Ages – the period's viability and meaning as a contemporary subject – we may turn, first, to Browning's evaluations of nineteenth-century medieval works, and then to his poems themselves.
Victorian Medievalism: Revival or Masquerade?
Authors: Roberts Helene E.
Published: October 2008

In seeking to revive the spirit, culture, and appearances of medieval times the Victorians used many stratagems. Among them, and often overlooked, was their antiquarian study of medieval dress and their wearing of costumes that represented medieval clothing. Whereas the eighteenth century had expressed their interest in the Middle Ages largely through Gothick novels and through architectural research and reconstructions, the nineteenth century, although continuing to look to a medieval inspiration in architecture, enveloped themselves in the more intimate clasp of medieval apparel and, thus accoutered, sought to enact the pageantry and pastimes of the medieval ages.
The Pre-Raphaelites and the “Mood of the Cloister”
Authors: Sussman Herbert
Published: October 2008

In his classic study of the Gothic revival, Kenneth Clark describes the transformation of the Gothic from its eighteenth-century associations with the non-rational, the non-civilized, and the mysterious into the sacramental Gothic created in large measure by Pugin and Ruskin. This transformation of medievalism continued through the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, sacramental Gothic had been subverted, changed into what Walter Pater calls in his essay “Aesthetic Poetry” a “profounder medievalism,” a medievalism that is closer in sensibility and artistic form to the contemporaneous Decadent movement on the Continent, to the work of Baudelaire and of Poe. This transformation can be illustrated in the sharp changes in the use of one of the most important signs of Victorian medievalism, the monastic or cloistered life, from the early Victorian writings of Thomas Carlyle, to the work of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and through Dante Gabriel Rossetti's watercolors of the late 1850s and William Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume of 1858, the original subject of Pater's essay.
Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism
Authors: Jann Rosemary
Published: October 2008

Critical attention to the dominant tradition of Victorian medievalism has stressed its essentially conservative tendencies. For representative proponents of this tradition – Carlyle, Ruskin, Young England – the imaginative value of the Middle Ages lay in their contrast with the political and social disorder of the present. The antidote to those modern poisons – laissez faire capitalism, Utilitarian ethics, Liberal individualism – lay in a resuscitation of medieval hierarchy, one which called on the Captains of Industry to form a new aristocracy, and the state to assume control over the economy and social welfare. For such thinkers, the spiritual health and organic order of medieval society depended upon its essentially undemocratic structure. The prominence of this analysis has unfortunately overshadowed the importance of two alternative treatments of Victorian medievalism, the Whig and the Socialist. While opposed in fundamental ways to one another, these interpretations are opposed in more significant ways to that dominant conservative tradition in that they created alternative myths of the Middle Ages to justify a more – not less – democratic society in the present and future. Such myths assisted the development of class consciousness by using the authority of history to sanction a social order which drew its moral and political strengths not from the ideals of the aristocracy, but from those of the middle and working classes, respectively. However, the following demonstration of the way similar historical points of departure can lead investigators to radically different conclusions ultimately reinforces the central characteristic of Victorian medievalism: that it represented less an attempt to recapture the past “as it really was” than a projection of current ideals back into time.
Honey-Mad Women: Charlotte Brontë's Bilingual Heroines
Authors: Yaeger Patricia S.
Published: October 2008

In Mythologiques Lévi-Strauss describes an exotically defiant figure – the Honey-Mad Woman – who eats honey in bizarre amounts, who feeds on it wildly and to excess. She consumes honey rather than plantains or meat because honey, as Lévi-Strauss explains, delineates the ambiguous border between culture and nature, the border where – in primitive societies – woman herself is asked to reside. As a prearticulated, predigested substance, honey is at once raw and cooked, processed and unprocessed; in consuming it in great quantities, the honey-mad woman becomes an archetype of sexual as well as gustatory defiance. Breaking the rules of politic eating, she covertly defies the system in which women are exchanged by men, for the ostensible purpose of containing women's “natural” disorder and fecundity. An inhabitant, then, of the agonistic border between nature and culture that societies erect to protect themselves from ideological collapse, woman is the unwitting dupe, the strange symbol, the wild card in a primitive metaphysic. But in consuming honey so avidly, the honey-mad woman preempts this symbolization, for by consuming a substance like herself, she usurps her society's right to consume her.
Dickens's Sublime Artifact
Authors: Thomas Ronald R.
Published: October 2008

John Ruskin'sSeven Lamps of Architecturewas among the books that Charles Dickens read at the seaside resort of Broadstairs during the summer of 1851. In November of that same year he commenced his great novel about the city,Bleak House(Forster 505). This work began the period of Dickens's last creative outpouring, in which he wrote the remarkable series of books that have sometimes been referred to as the dark novels. The connection between these events may be found in one of the central chapters ofThe Seven Lamps, “The Lamp of Power.” There Ruskin identifies the sublime in architecture as “a severe, and in many cases mysterious majesty, which we remember with an undiminished awe, like that felt at the presence and operation of some great Spiritual Power” (100). It is important for Ruskin that the architectural sublime – since it is based in a human construction – resembles but is not equivalent to the operation of a “great Spiritual Power.” InModern Painters, he also located “the first step” of the sublime in “human power,” explicitly placing the origin of this inherently superhuman quality within humanity itself (128).
Self-duality of Selmer groups
Authors: DOKCHITSER TIM , DOKCHITSER VLADIMIR
Published: October 2008

The first part of the paper gives a new proof of self-duality for Selmer groups: if A is an abelian variety over a number field K, and F/K is a Galois extension with Galois group G, then the $\Q_p$G-representation naturally associated to the p∞-Selmer group of A/F is self-dual. The second part describes a method for obtaining information about parities of Selmer ranks from the local Tamagawa numbers of A in intermediate extensions of F/K.
An ecological analysis of sociodemographic factors associated with the incidence of salmonellosis, shigellosis, and E. coli O157:H7 infections in US counties
Authors: CHANG M. , GROSECLOSE S. L. , ZAIDI A. A. , BRADEN C. R.
Published: October 2008

Identifying county-level sociodemographic and economic factors associated with the incidence of enteric disease may provide new insights concerning the dynamics of community transmission of these diseases as well as opportunities for prevention. We used data from the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Health Resources and Services Administration to conduct an ecological analysis of 26 sociodemographic and economic factors associated with the incidence of salmonellosis, shigellosis, and E. coli O157:H7 infections in US counties for the period 1993 to 2002. Our study indicates that race, ethnicity, place of residence, age, educational attainment, and poverty may affect the risk of acquiring one of these enteric bacterial diseases. The lack of specificity of information regarding salmonellae and shigellae serotypes may have led to less specific associations between community-level determinants and reported incidence of those diseases. Future ecological analyses should use serotype-specific data on incidence, which may be available from laboratory-based surveillance systems.
Deterministic Random Walks on the Two-Dimensional Grid
Authors: DOERR BENJAMIN , FRIEDRICH TOBIAS
Published: October 2008

Jim Propp's rotor–router model is a deterministic analogue of a random walk on a graph. Instead of distributing chips randomly, each vertex serves its neighbours in a fixed order. We analyse the difference between the Propp machine and random walk on the infinite two-dimensional grid. It is known that, apart from a technicality, independent of the starting configuration, at each time the number of chips on each vertex in the Propp model deviates from the expected number of chips in the random walk model by at most a constant. We show that this constant is approximately 7.8 if all vertices serve their neighbours in clockwise or order, and 7.3 otherwise. This result in particular shows that the order in which the neighbours are served makes a difference. Our analysis also reveals a number of further unexpected properties of the two-dimensional Propp machine.
Enlarging the Heart: L. E. L.'s “The Improvisatrice,” Hemans's “Properzia Rossi,” and Barrett Browning'sAurora Leigh
Authors: Louis Margot K.
Published: October 2008

Elizabeth barrett browning's relation to her female predecessors was complex, conflicted, and rewarding. InAurora Leighwe see both the heroine and her creator grow from poets who attempt to prove themselves in traditionally masculine terms, into poets who engage with a feminine tradition of sentimental verse which they resist and criticize but nevertheless find of essential value. Only by viewing the poem against the backdrop of the sentimental tradition can we fully appreciate Barrett Browning's challenge to the cult of privacy and the doctrine of separate spheres, her dual emphasis on poetry as at once a job requiring doggedness and a vocation requiring wide social and religious vision, and, finally, her sense of the connection between herself and her female predecessors. Such poets as Felicia Hemans and L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) stand in a relation to Barrett Browning which resembles the unsentimental aunt's relation to Aurora in Book 1 ofAurora Leigh: there is more conflict than sympathy in the relationship; the older woman represents a version of femininity which the younger must at all costs resist; and yet the older woman leaves the younger a legacy which is both narrow and enabling, an essential basis for the young poet's future achievement.
Folklore, Fear, and the Feminine: Ghosts and Old Wives' Tales inWuthering Heights
Authors: Krebs Paula M.
Published: October 2008

Wuthering heights is haunted, of course. But not only by the ghost of Catherine, who harries Heathcliff and terrifies Lockwood. Not only by the shades of Heathcliff and Catherine (or Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon) who set off toward Penistone Crag. The ghosts inWuthering Heightsare not Gothic ghosts nor the ghosts from Victorian magazine ghost stories. They represent a different kind of haunting altogether — the haunting of the Victorian middle classes by fear of the people they designated as “the folk.”
Disciplining and Disinfecting Working-Class Readers in the Victorian Public Library
Authors: Roberts Lewis C.
Published: October 2008

In an uncharacteristic burst of rhetoric and emotion, the 1849 Select Committee on Public Libraries implored:

Shall we therefore abandon the people to the influence of a low, enfeebling, and often pestilential literature, instead of enabling them to breathe a more pure, elevated, and congenial atmosphere? (viii)

The means of bringing about such a literate atmosphere was the funding of a system of public libraries, institutions freely open to all, but especially aimed at working-class readers. These institutions would provide access to books unavailable to the working-class reading public. In providing such access, the libraries were also to ensure that books would be free of the “pestilential” influences of the “low” kinds of texts commonly available to the working class. The public library was thus to purify, elevate, and disinfect working-class reading.
The “Supplementary Chapter” to Bulwer Lytton's A Strange Story
Authors: Brown Andrew
Published: October 2008

On August 3, 1860 Dickens wrote to his friend Bulwer Lytton asking whether he might be prepared to contribute “a tale” to All the Year Round. The inquiry was speculative, but prompted by characteristic editorial foresight. The magazine's current serial, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, was nearing completion, Charles Lever's A Day's Ride was waiting to take over from it, and Dickens himself was beginning to contemplate a new novel which, as Great Expectations, was subsequently issued between December 1860 and August 1861. Evidently he was already thinking of their successor, and clearly he recognized that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, ex-cabinet minister and pillar of the literary establishment, would be a real catch. Bulwer did not reply immediately, though he was in fact already making preliminary sketches for the novel that would become A Strange Story. The idea for the book had come to him in a dream (as, twenty years earlier, had that for his other great tale of the supernatural, Zanoni), and as it developed during the summer of 1860 it gradually supplanted his other work in progress — the historical novel of ancient Greece Pausanias the Spartan (eventually published posthumously in 1876, still incomplete). In October 1860, while vacationing in Corfu, he noted ruefully that his “mystic story” was at a standstill, but on his return to England the following month he was sufficiently encouraged to respond, at least tentatively, to Dickens's inquiry.
“Reader Response” in the Nineties
Authors: Flynn Elizabeth A.
Published: October 2008

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'sThe Reader in the Textand Jane Tompkins'sReader-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'sReaders in History(1993) and Andrew Bennett'sReaders and Reading(1995) have not received the attention of the earlier collections, and most of the essays inReaders and Readingare 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.
The Crevice in the Canvas: A Study of The Mayor of Casterbridge
Authors: Ramel Annie
Published: October 2008

The second chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a metaphor that is worth considering: “The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when the man awoke” (17; ch. 2). The “crevices of the canvas” are, in my opinion, emblematic of the breach by which Henchard has just severed the bonds between himself and humankind. Not only has he shaken loose from his wife, he has also, more importantly, discarded his own daughter. As Elaine Showalter has pointed out, the sale of the child brings to the fore the question of paternity; Henchard has broken the symbolic chain which connected him to both his ancestors and his offspring, and he re-enters society alone, “the new Adam, reborn, self-created, unencumbered” (57). In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, as Jan Gordon observes, a similar rupture affects historical continuity (366). The pointed shaft of the mail-cart piercing the breast of the unhappy horse, Prince, and releasing a flood of blood that cannot be staunched, represents that breach metaphorically. In the two novels, Hardy deals with a breach in the succession of generations and the subsequent impossibility to re-unite what has been sundered. In both stories, a missing link in a chain of symbolic transmission sets off a tragic process that will end only with the death of the heroes.
Mesmerism and Agency in the Courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
Authors: Chapman Alison
Published: October 2008

It has not passed unnoticed that the courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett coincides with Barrett's ambivalent fascination for mesmerism. But what has not been explicated is the interrelationship between mesmeric agency, the courtship correspondence, and Barrett's autobiographicalSonnets from the Portuguese. Daniel Karlin has suggestively described Barrett's representation of her suitor as an erotic mesmerist, to Browning's discomfort, but Karlin assumes the familiar stereotype of mesmeric power as an unproblematic operation of a dominant male practitioner upon a passive female patient. This essay critiques such an assumption, and suggests that a revised model of mesmeric influence helps elucidate not only Barrett's representation of the courtship in the letters and theSonnets, but literary influence as well. If Barrett depicts herself in the thrall of a mesmeric agency, then how do we read what is interpreted by feminist critics as her revolutionary active subject position in theSonnets, which has been taken as the transformation of Victorian women's poetry?
Sexual Secrets and Social Knowledge: Henry James'sThe Sacred Fount
Authors: Davis Lloyd
Published: October 2008

Henry James's Autobiography recalls a first vision of “vast portentous London” in 1855, and contrasts brother William's boredom to his own imaginative response to the city (Small Boy157, 170–71). Having moved there, he feels that amid the “London scene” he can fully exercise his “intellectual curiosity,” feeding “on the great supporting and enclosing scene itself” (Middle Years553, 564). A later announcement to William Dean Howells that “henceforth I must do, or half do, England in fiction” comes as no surprise (Letters284). James would follow up his intention in half-a-dozen novels, gradually refining the treatment of broad aesthetic, moral, and political issues inThe Tragic MuseandThe Princess Casamassimato a more specific “form of social-scientific inquiry” into characters and their interactions (Mizruchi 119). The novels written during the last years of Victoria's reign —The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, andThe Sacred Fount— convey perceptions of crumbling social values, “the lost sense, the brutalized manner” (James,Notebooks196), through close analysis of individuals' speech, actions, motives, and relationships. Indeed, James held that wider trends were summed up by the differences between the personal traits of Victoria and her heir. After the old queen's death, he voiced misgivings in various letters: whereas she had been “a kind of nursing mother of the land and of the empire,” Edward was “an arch-vulgarian,” whose accession seemed bound to bring “vulgarity and frivolity” (qtd. in Edel 2: 426). The tone is first gloomy, “It's a new era — and we don't know what it is,” and later resigned: “We live notoriously, as I suppose every age lives, in an ‘epoch of transition’ ” (Preface,Awkward Age12). A strong conviction that personal and social behavior influence and signify each other informs such comments.
“Neither Monsters nor Temptresses nor Terrors”:Representing Desire in Charlotte Brontë'sShirley
Authors: Gardner Julia
Published: October 2008

Although romanceQUAromance 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 ofShirleyand establishes the vexed dynamic surrounding the marriage plot present throughout the novel.
Culture and Economics
Authors: Gagnier Regenia
Published: October 2008

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.
What We Talk about When We Talk about Hardy's Poetry, or How They Brought the Bad News from Essex to Wessex
Authors: Neill Edward
Published: October 2008

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 inThomas Hardy and British Poetrysaluted 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.
Bleak House, Political Economy, Victorian Studies
Authors: Blake Kathleen
Published: October 2008

Dickens is not known as a political economist. He is the critic of workhouse abuses (made topical by Benthamite Poor Law reform) inOliver Twistand the caricaturist of the father of Adam Smith and Malthus Gradgrind inHard Times. Students of Victorian literature familiarly takeHard Timesas F. R. Leavis does as a condemnation of “The World of Bentham,” of utilitarianism, philosophic radicalism, political economy. It is what we expect whenDickens, The Critical Heritagegives us John Stuart Mill complaining aboutBleak Houseand that “creature” Dickens for a portrait of Mrs. Jellyby that he finds antifeminist (to Harriet Taylor, March 20, 1854, qtd. in Collins, 297–98). But consider: inBleak Housethere is a passage where Mr. Skimpole declares his family to be “all wrong in point of political economy” (454). His “Beauty daughter” marries young, takes a husband who is another child; they are improvident, have two children, bring them home to Skimpole's, as he expects his other daughters to do as well, though they none of them know how they will get on. Skimpole is exposed in the course of the novel as one of its worst characters. For a bribe and to save himself from infection he turns the smallpox-stricken Jo out into the night. He cadges loans from those who can't afford to make them. He encourages Richard in his fatal false hopes of a Chancery settlement for a payback to himself for helping the lawyer Mr. Vholes to a client. Esther Summerson ultimately condemns him, and Mr. Jarndyce breaks with him. If Skimpole is all wrong in point of political economy, can there be something all right with political economy for Dickens?
Textual Seductions: Women's Reading and Writing in Margaret Oliphant's “The Library Window”
Authors: Heller Tamar
Published: October 2008

Margaret oliphants ghost story “The Library Window” (1896) — one of the last works of its author's prolific career — is haunted by images of reading and writing. Visiting her aunt, the young narrator (never named) reads obsessively, perched in the window seat where she witnesses another scene of textuality. Some claim that a window in the college library across the street is only “fictitious panes marked on the wall” (296), yet in a series of increasingly vivid tableaux the girl sees through those panes a young man seated in a study “writing, writing always” (305). So entranced is she by this vision of scholarship, so convinced of its reality, that she is devastated to learn the window is indeed a fake and the young man a ghost who appears to her because of a curse on the female members of her family: he was killed by the brothers of another young girl — the narrator's ancestor — when they mistakenly assumed he was responding to her flirtatious overtures as she waved to him across the street.
Aubrey Beardsley's “Japanese” Grotesques
Authors: Zatlin Linda Gertner
Published: October 2008

Aubrey Beardsley made major contributions to the art of the grotesque. Initially, he probably learned the theory as well as the technique of creating designs in this mode from the work of medieval European artists. His own development of the grotesque, however, rests on his treatment of subject matter, a treatment which was influenced by Japanese woodblock artists. The double viewpoint, both expressing an author's point of view and critiquing one's own society, is seen most frequently in humorous grotesque Japanese woodblock designs, which were collected, exhibited, and reproduced in England during the 1890s. In order to detail one of Beardsley's major contributions to this form, this essay will first delineate Beardsley's attraction to the grotesque as well as his exposure to Japanese art, and, after examining the ways in which the grotesque works, it will concentrate on Beardsley's adaptations of the Japanese grotesque.
Signs of Intimacy: The Literary Celebrity in the “Age of Interviewing”
Authors: Salmon Richard
Published: October 2008

In his project for the tale “The Death of The Lion” (1894), Henry James envisaged the mythical, and distinctively modern, fate of the artist as celebrity. Besieged by journalists, lionizers, and autograph-hunters, the celebrated writer is subjected to a voracious desire for knowledge concerning his life, whilst, conversely, the work, upon which his literary fame supposedly rests, is neglected. The work of the author is displaced from its position as the privileged object of literary interpretation by a proliferation of new cultural practices which construe the “life” as a more vital source of meaning. Through such media as advertising, journalism and photography, authors, like the texts which they produce, are marketed as commodities, as products to be circulated and consumed.