James Fitzjames Stephen,John Stuart Mill,and the Victorian Theory of Toleration

Due to his famous conflict with John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen is often assumed to have been an opponent of toleration and intellectual freedom and a defender of authoritarian or reactionary principles. These assumptions are misleading. Stephen was, and was known in his time to have been, a champion of toleration. This essay provides a comprehensive overview of his writing on these themes, drawing from a wider array of texts than is usually considered in the study of the Stephen-Mill controversy. Contrary to popular belief, Stephen had a deep and multi-faceted argument in favor of toleration. As a critic of contending theories of toleration and freedom of discussion (especially Mill’s), Stephen was concerned to defeat what he saw as the resurgence of a priori principles in Victorian political philosophy and to combat the expansion of a proper notion of toleration to include a cluster of beliefs and attitudes of which he disapproved. In his approach to these issues Stephen was, arguably, as representative of Victorian thinking as the author of On Liberty.     

Monster soup: the microscope and Victorian fantasy

Abstract

The Victorian predilection for the grotesque owed more than is commonly recognised to nature's microdimension. During the heyday of natural history in Britain (c. 1820–70), the microscope revealed myriads of shapes and creatures so utterly unfamiliar that writers on the subject resorted to flamboyant prose in order to render them intelligible. This had reverberations not least for the visual arts. The metaphors chosen by authors attempting to describe the microscopic world soon developed a visual presence, with supernatural features being projected even onto illustrations in supposedly scientific contexts. At the same time, such illustrations share certain motifs and/or stylistic characteristics with fairy paintings and illustrations by artists such as Daniel Maclise (1806–70), Richard Dadd (1817–86), Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901), and Arthur Hughes (1832–1915). In view of this, the fact that the golden age of British fairy painting coincided chronologically with the Victorian craze for microscopy seems to be the result of more than mere chance. If we acknowledge this, we must also ask whether, in the mid nineteenth century, points of contact between microscopy and the visual arts led to a liberation or else a limitation of fantasy.     

Form and deformity: the trouble with Victorian pockets

This essay explores the Victorian debate about the place of pockets in men's and women's clothing. By studying the representation of men as naturally pocketed creatures and the general denial of useful pockets to middle-class women, the essay demonstrates the tenacious cultural logic by which men's and women's pockets were imagined to correspond to sexual differences and to index access, or lack thereof, to public mobility and financial agency. Interconnected readings of visual art, essays, and novels show how the common sense about gendered pockets was utilized and promulgated in Victorian narratives. The question of who gets pockets is thus positioned as part of the history of gendered bodies in public space.     

Tender Beauty: Victorian Painting and the Problem of Sentimentality

One of the most enduring critical legacies of modernism has been the condemnation of the sentimentality of Victorian art. This essay argues that recent art historical attempts to discuss Victorian sentimentality are condemned to repeat modernist critical judgements about sentimental art because of their espousal of historicist methodologies which produce historical distance between artwork and the critical viewer in the present. Instead, I argue, our own emotional involvement with Victorian paintings should form part of our scholarly accounts of their meanings, because their affective power is central to their aesthetic qualities. To look properly, I argue, is also to feel. To exemplify this I discuss Augustus Mulready's Remembering the Joys that Have Passed Away (1873), in order to show how a sentimental look at this painting undermines approaches that absorb sentimentality into historicist, social-constructionist and ideological accounts of such a picture.     

Justifying sacrifice: Barack Obama and the selling and ending of the war in Afghanistan

Since taking office, United States President Barack Obama has attempted to refocus and revitalize the US war against terrorism. The centrepiece of this effort has been an increased emphasis on the war in Afghanistan, which he has characterized as the real frontline of the war on terror—as opposed to the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq war. After years of fighting under the Bush administration, Obama has had to ‘sell’ to the US public the renewed effort in Afghanistan and bordering Pakistan in order to maintain support for his policy. In speeches and other public pronouncements, Obama has drawn heavily on the idea of ‘sacrifice’ to justify the deepening of the commitment to the war, arguing that the costs of the war are necessary in order to keep the US safe from further terrorist attacks. This article explores this symbolic engagement with the sacrifices being made in the name of keeping the United States ‘safe’ from terrorism. It considers whether this approach resonates with public and elite opinion; it also considers the sustainability of underlying public support for the war and analyses how Obama has adapted his approach in order to fulfil his goal of drawing the US intervention to a close. While Obama appears to have judged well the price that the US public is willing to pay to defend against terrorism, it is argued that there are major risks involved in using the central principle of sacrifice when justifying the war. Obama has risked creating a ‘sacrifice trap’ whereby the more emphasis is placed on the sacrifices being made, the more necessary it becomes to demonstrate outcomes that make those sacrifices worthwhile. Obama's ultimate objective of withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan may yet be undermined, therefore, by the justifications he has given for the continued importance of the commitment.     

Common misperceptions: the press and Victorian views of crime

After a string of successes in the early nineteenth century, the Victorian movement to reform criminal punishment began to falter. Despite evidence to the contrary, the populace grew convinced that violent crime was on the rise. A frequency analysis of The Times and The Manchester Guardian suggests that this misperception was due to a drastic increase in crime coverage by the periodicals of the day.     

Hinton Rowan Helper's the land of gold and the evolution of race relations in California

The California Gold Rush of the mid‐nineteenth century attracted a multitude of prospectors from around the world, bringing together a vibrant mix of ethnicities and cultures. Historians have argued that race emerged as the most important mark of identity in California as whites labeled and eventually excluded ‘inferior’ races. Hinton Rowan Helper's The Land of Gold documented his three‐year trip to California in the early 1850s, recording his reactions to ‘others’ in detail. Helper has been portrayed as the archetypal white racist on the California frontier. This essay challenges that view, contending that he was more preoccupied with culture and behavior than race. It evaluates Helper's comments on, first, Native Americans, second, the Chinese, and finally, his wider reactions to California and the construction of whiteness.     

A Victorian Embarrassment: Consular Jurisdiction and the Evils of Extraterritoriality

In 1856, the Treaty of Paris nominally welcomed the Ottoman Empire into the Concert of Europe, but this exposed a deep fault line in international relations. Although the gesture implied full sovereign rights, it seemed incompatible with the extraterritorial privileges held by Europeans in Ottoman lands under the age-old capitulations. New commercial treaties complicated the issue by extending similar privileges to British subjects as far afield as China, Siam and Japan. Consular jurisdiction soon became the focus of controversy in Westminster as extraterritoriality featured prominently in local disputes following British commercial expansion across Asia, among them the Arrow incident that led to the Second Opium War. In Japan and other states, it would also become a key grievance in popular campaigns against ‘unequal treaties’ and the injustices of informal empire. This analysis shows how, even before such narratives of resistance emerged, there was already a seam of ambivalence in Victorian political discourse on the question of extraterritoriality. In the Foreign Office, it came as no surprise to be told of defects in these treaties, but it was the context of the existing debate, notably fresh initiatives to set up mixed courts, that framed the British response.     

Afterimages of the Victorian City

As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectroscope by the artist Paul St George. It traces two distinct genealogies of renderings of Victorian urban spaces in current popular culture. While filmic renderings are obsessed with the ghostly circulation of Victorian spectres haunting the present, steampunk artists imagine an alternative temporality, locating the origin of an alternative future in the mobility of Victorian metropolitan culture.