Diverse Strains: Music and Religion in Dickens's Edwin Drood

Music in Dickens's final and unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, shares in the lethargy affecting traditional English community. That life has become stagnant in Cloisterham, the ancient city in which the novel is set, is nowhere more evident than in the desultory choral worship offered in its cathedral. Yet the unevenness of Dickens's writing in Edwin Drood does not make for consistency, and discrepancies in plotting extend to the musical occupations of its protagonists. By considering Edwin Drood alongside the shifting fortunes of choral music in Victorian Britain, this article focuses on what such discrepancies reveal about Dickens's notion of the place of religion in social renewal. Habitual forms of life in Cloisterham, such as the choral service of its cathedral, are being overwhelmed by marginal presences, arriving from the imperial East, but they may also give voice to a future revival. Something of the changeability in Dickens's feeling for established religion can be glimpsed in this duality.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

OPACITY AND TRANSPARENCY IN HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONS

In his latest book Frank Ankersmit develops a comprehensive philosophical perspective on the problem of the truth and reference of historical representations. The approach and the wider perspective of the book largely belong to what could be called the postmodernist paradigm, in spite of some recent attempts to interpret Ankersmit's recent work differently. Since his 1983 Narrative Logic Ankersmit has propounded the view that individual statements that constitute historical representations may have reference, but that representations themselves do not. His most recent book remains faithful to this position and elaborates it further. This essay examines Ankersmit's arguments as well as the assumptions and implications of this view.     

Darwin Wept: Science and the Sentimental Subject

Could a man of science be sentimental in an age of objectivity, when emotions were largely purged from the field of Victorian science, and feelings themselves defined as animal instincts and reflex mechanisms? This essay addresses the question through Darwin's work on the expression of emotions, and the relationship between his work and his own emotional experience, with particular attention to grief and tears. An old woman in a railway carriage is suddenly overcome with a painful recollection, perhaps that of a long lost child – her mouth becomes ever so slightly contracted, her countenance falls, her eyes suffuse with tears … . An opthalmic surgeon perseveres with his treatise on the physiology of weeping while mourning the loss of his daughter … . With difficulty, a mother prolongs her infant son's screaming in order to record the shape of his mouth for a family friend and famous naturalist … . Her observations later appear in a work on emotional expression (Darwin's), together with photographs of sobbing children, and faces of a psychiatric patient charged with electrodes. Such subject matter, presented in correspondence, private journals, and print, suggest that science and sentimentality could form a more reciprocal pair, where observation was conducted in a sentimental setting, the feelings of observers regulated but not withheld, processed by an experimental regime, and then reinserted in the domain of print, reconfiguring the sentimental for Victorian readers.     

Shoddy heap: a material history between waste and manufacture

This essay uses a present-day mountain of textile waste known as ‘shoddy’ as an entry point into the history and ramifications of the development of wool recycling technology in West Yorkshire, England. It is argued that this entity, produced since the early nineteenth century by means of the collection, shredding, and re-spinning of old and discarded wool rags, emerged as both technological innovation and raw material. Its history, defined in part by its precarious position at the nexus of waste and manufacture, is that of a reconfiguration of technology with simultaneously ethical, political, and environmental dimensions.     

Oscar Wilde,Music, and the ‘Opium-Tainted Cigarette’: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play

This article shows how the musical references in Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray are important to the identity of the dandy, especially in relation to the literary-critical work of Matthew Arnold, whose guiding presence in Wilde's oeuvre has traditionally been somewhat underestimated. Wilde's male characters, although famously fond of music, reveal ‘disinterestedness’ in earnest musical pursuits, similar to the ‘Indian virtue of detachment’ outlined by Arnold in his exploration of ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864, in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 26–51). Furthermore, the critical attitude of the dandy–aesthete intersects with the implications that we can read into the posture of the lounging opium smoker. Extensive scholarship has already established the relationship between the East and opium in fictional works by Thomas de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Music is an essential ingredient to this literature, too, both in terms of its narrative presence and because it is a key element in an ongoing, nineteenth-century British exploration of how stylistic innovations could be represented as ‘music’. After disclosing the close connections between dandyism and those nineteenth-century composers whose lives and works were often represented as dandyish (Berlioz, Chopin and Schumann), the essay builds from the tradition of opium-inspired fiction. It suggests Wilde's debt to Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), while also showing Wilde's innovations in making shifts in character and narrative voice into indicators of narcotic consumption.     

Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure,Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

This essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar's Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe's novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne's and Frazar's adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system.     

The Pillars of “Mahathir's Islam”: Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim in the Modern World

Unlike his bourgeois economic nationalism or diplomatic posturing on behalf of the developing world, Mahathir Mohamad's encounter with Islam remains a largely understudied aspect of his 22-year rule of Malaysia (1981–2003). There is a marked reluctance to take seriously his pronouncements on Islam and engage with his representations of what being-Muslim should entail in the modern world. This essay takes the view that Islam, in fact, represents a significant component of the former Malaysian prime minister's political repertoire, and that an analysis of what may be described as “Mahathir's Islam” can provide a compelling alternative account of his momentous premiership. It argues that while Mahathir's engagement with Islam was fraught with contradictions and has produced a number of negative consequences that affect Malaysian society as a whole, his discourse also contained the ingredients of what Bellah and Hammond (1980) have famously described as civil religion. Mahathir's public representations of Islam – in particular, his championing of the individually responsible believer and interpretation of the message to the Prophet Muhammad as a this-worldly and pro-active “theology of progress” – can thus provide religious validation to the cosmopolitanism of the street that has helped underwrite the social peace of multi-religious Malaysia.     

Conformity and resistance in the Victorian penal system: archaeological investigations at Parliament House,Edinburgh

Abstract

Archaeological investigations at Parliament House in Edinburgh included the recovery of artefacts from a void discovered during building works. This space had been used as undercourt jail cells in the late 19th century, a time of penal reform. The assemblage contains items representing domestic, light industrial and clerical activities, as well as personal items such as children's toys and women's clothing. The Victorian penal code, contemporary accounts of prisoners, warders and chaplains, and historical and criminological studies suggest that they reflect not only the Prison Board's attempt to enforce conformity but also prisoners' and prison employees' resistance to the system.     

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.     

‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’: Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre,Art and Journalism in Victorian London

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age.     

Mapping the Contours of Race: Griffith Taylor's Zones and Strata Theory

This article explores the ways in which cartography served as a tool to reinforce racial divisions in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century race science. Racial and anthropometric mapping was an endeavour in which both European and new world anthropologists and geographers were involved. The focus here is on the work of Thomas Griffith Taylor – regarded as one of the founders of modern geography in Australia – who deployed a number of cartographic techniques to reinforce his racial theorisations. This article explores Taylor's ‘zones and strata’ portrayal of racial evolution, and other geological‐ style maps of racial difference. These representations are investigated from two standpoints. Firstly, Taylor's theories are situated within the wider context of the Victorian tradition of classifying race, a tradition where physical race type was often correlated with moral and intellectual traits, and which was supported by the acceptance of environmental determinism within geographical circles. Secondly, his maps are considered from the perspective that, as J.B. Harley has argued, maps are social texts that contain power and, as such, can be deconstructed. Taylor's cartographic representations resulted from the manipulation of the internal elements of the map text, such as shading and projection, and were supported by the widely held belief that human racial groups could be delineated through physical anthropometry.     

The Authoritative Medium: George Eliot,Ruin, and the Rationalized Market

This essay analyses the competing dynamics that shaped the formation of market relations in mid-nineteenth-century Britain: abstraction and rationalization, on the one hand, and embeddedness and personalism, on the other. It takes as its central case the mid-century debates over bankruptcy reform, focusing in particular on two textual representations of ‘ruin’: the system of certificates classifying bankrupts according to their culpability of character, established in 1849 and abolished in 1861; and Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, with its account of financial and sexual ruin. I argue that the debates surrounding the character certificates' intervention in market relations, and Eliot's explorations of abstract and embedded or sympathetic modes of knowledge were part of a larger concern to negotiate the tensions produced by the contemporary impulse toward market rationalization. Eliot's mode of omniscient narration – her construction of a simultaneously interested and disinterested, authoritative and sympathetic narrative voice – represented, I suggest, a novelistic instance of a broader cultural fantasy that an approach to character representation could be found that would mediate the changing marketplace. At the same time, her narration of the story of debt through familial and sexualized representations highlights the way that the personal continued to pose a challenge to the establishment of market rationality. However, despite the generic distinctions that can be traced, I argue that their shared interest in character provides grounds for the project of reading across genres, and suggest that the cultural history of the Victorian credit economy requires attention to what different genres have in common, as much as how they have diverged.     

The Importance of Cheltenham: Imperialism,Liminality and Gustav Holst

The study of liminality, pioneered by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, and reinvigorated by Victor Turner, considers the ambiguity that exists for individuals as they move between defined groups or identities. Reconsidering the relationship between the British composer, Gustav Holst (1874–1934), and his birthplace, the west country spa town of Cheltenham, provides not only a case study of the general liminality of the professional musician, but of a figure who is betwixt and between in almost all aspects of his life. In essence, Holst is the archetype of a liminal being. This study problematizes Holst's place in the received history of British music, arguing that his liminality has been overlooked in various attempts to make his life and music fit a mainstream narrative for English musical culture, the so-called Second English Musical Renaissance. The origins of that liminality are explored by considering Holst's relationship with Victorian Cheltenham, ranging widely from the civic to the religious, from the public to the private, and from the individual to the social. This includes his contact with prominent influences such as imperialism and evangelicalism, but also elements that are seemingly more marginal to the town but central for Holst, such as Theosophy. Doing so clarifies the origins and importance of Holst's relentlessly liminal status in Victorian and Edwardian society, demonstrating how such reconsiderations can reshape the historical narrative of Victorian influence on the twentieth century.     

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.     

Thomas Arnold,Christian Manliness and the Problem of Boyhood

Thomas Arnold is a well-known character in Victorian Studies. His life and work are usually discussed in relation to his role as Headmaster of Rugby School and the development of the English public school system. His importance in the history of Victorian manliness has, by contrast, been somewhat obscured. When scholars do comment on his highly influential idea of Christian manliness, they tend to assume it was an overtly gendered ideal, opposed to a well-developed notion of effeminacy. A closer study of Arnold's thought and writings, as well as the reflections of his contemporaries and pupils, reveals rather that his understanding of manliness was structured primarily around an opposition between moral maturity on the one hand and immoral boyishness on the other. As this article argues, one of Arnold's chief concerns at Rugby was to ‘anticipate’ or ‘hasten’ the onset of moral manhood in his pupils. Moreover, his discussion of manliness in his role as Headmaster was closely connected to his work as a historian – another neglected aspect of Arnold's career. Inspired, above all, by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico, Arnold's historical writing is punctuated by the Vichian concept that nations, like individuals, pass through distinct stages of maturity, from infancy, through childhood, manhood, age and decrepitude. A close reading of Arnold's school sermons and other works on the peculiar dangers of boyhood suggests clearly that his historical writing inspired the notions of moral manliness and vicious boyhood that underpinned much of his educational thought.     

Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Mary Seacole's autobiography has been read as a feminist performance as well as a paradigmatic Victorian travel narrative. While these assessments address important aspects of the memoir, neither affords the author's Jamaicanness significant space in its analysis. This essay addresses the silences left when Wonderful Adventures is removed from its Jamaican context, then offers a reading of it from this perspective. Grounded in histories that document nineteenth‐century Jamaican social categories, the article analyses Seacole's book using Caribbean literary perspectives that explore raced, ‘coloured’ and geographically‐located identities. The result is an interpretation of the memoir that offers insight into Jamaica's Creole population, its status and colour politics, and identity concerns. All have been expertly shaped by Seacole's rhetorical manoeuvres.     

Reappraising Walter Bagehot's Liberalism: Discussion,Public Opinion,and the Meaning of Parliamentary Government

Summary

This article offers a novel and comprehensive account of Walter Bagehot's political thought. It ties together an interpretation of Bagehot's liberal commitment to norms of discussion and deliberation, with an analysis of Bagehot's extensive arguments about the institutions of representative government. We show how Bagehot's opposition to American-style presidentialism, to parliamentary democracy, and to proportional representation were profoundly shaped by his conceptions of government by discussion, and the rule of public opinion. Bagehot's criticisms of English parliamentarianism, both of its pre-1832 and post-1832 varieties were also motivated by those principles, as was his own proposal for parliamentary reform. By examining the whole range of Bagehot's writings on representative government (not merely his preference for parliamentarianism over presidentialism) and by connecting his institutional recommendations to his liberal principles, we are also able to better clarify Bagehot's position in Victorian political thought. The article concludes with a discussion of the debate leading up to the Second Reform Act, in which we elucidate Bagehot's disagreements with other prominent exponents of liberalism including John Stuart Mill, the “university liberals,” and Robert Lowe.     

‘The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life’: Lewis Carroll and Victorian Psychiatric Practice

An analysis of the numerous connections of Lewis Carroll to the Victorian psychiatric profession reveals their influence on the portrayal of insanity in Carroll’s fiction. Through examining his relationship with his uncle Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge, a Commissioner in Lunacy, and collating Carroll’s personal recollections from diaries and letters with correspondences of the Lunacy Commission, this article offers a comprehensive picture of Carroll’s intellectual engagement with Victorian psychiatry. Combining these insights with his literary writings illuminates the psychiatric origins of the ‘Mad Tea-Party’ and characters such as the Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the organization and methods of mid-Victorian pauper lunatic asylums and their treatment of impoverished workers. Likewise, the illustrations of Carroll’s works stood in dialogue with popular imagery of insanity as well as ideas of physiognomy and their diagnostic application in asylum photography by Hugh Welch Diamond. This piece will argue that the framework of Victorian psychiatry provided Carroll with imagery he utilizes to satirize aspects of Victorian moral values. It thus aims to highlight the benefits of re-framing the works of Lewis Carroll beyond the genre children’s literature, and considering them as part of the wider Victorian discourse of the sciences of the mind.