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Oliver as Object: Character, Genre, and Agency in the Victorian Novel

Meegan Kennedy, Florida State University

When I teach Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, I notice that students are often frustrated by Oliver’s passivity in the face of so many wrongs. Oliver moves through many different settings in the novel—baby farm, workhouse, apprenticeships with a chimney sweep, undertaker, and crime syndicate, safe havens in the city and country. But with scant exceptions, he has little control over his movements and seldom speaks; others generally move him and speak for him. Even Oliver’s famous plea for more gruel only occurs after prodding from other boys.

George Cruikshank, Oliver asking for more. Etching on paper, 1838. Public domain.

Students come to Oliver Twist conditioned by the many novels, memoirs, and films they’ve encountered that present inspiring stories about protagonists struggling and ultimately triumphing over adversity. From Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, from Harry Potter to Disney’s Mulan, young protagonists often challenge and inspire readers as they learn to define the self and push back against oppressive social constructs. But students are baffled by Oliver, who is anything but rebellious despite the outrageous institutional and personal abuses that children like him suffered under the 1834 New Poor Law. The law turned away from local control of public welfare, embracing instead Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy, the new “numerical method” of statistics, and the quantification of public policy by a developing metropolitan class of administrators. It was widely decried for its harsh effects, especially on families and children. As the novel opens, Oliver is a generic “parish boy,” orphaned and indigent, without distinguishing features. Dickens shows how quickly he was “badged and ticketed” into this bureaucratic system. He becomes less than human, more an object than a person.

The New Poor Law. Poster, 1837. Credit: National Archives.

Some scholars have accounted for Oliver’s lack of personal growth and action by arguing that Dickens was, in 1837, still learning as a novelist. They find psychological complexity and development more often in his later novels, which more clearly fulfill the genre of the Bildungsroman.

But Dickens was playing with quite different genres for Oliver Twist. The novel weaves together elements of allegory, parody, statistical report, it-narrative, captivity narrative, Newgate novel, and finally romance. Many of these genres not only accommodate but demand a certain flatness of character. The genres Dickens explores in Oliver Twist support his argument that the New Poor Law treats thinking, feeling individual people as units exchangeable at will. The flatness of Oliver’s character dramatizes this critique. Where a novel of development would emphasize individual struggle, Oliver Twist instead turns its focus on systemic oppression.

Dickens especially uses the statistical report and it-narrative to demonstrate the human cost of the New Poor Law, and to show how utilitarianism and the new law constrain the richness of human experience. Dickens’s serialization of Oliver Twist was interrupted by the parodic statistical reports he published from “the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything,” which mock the inadequacy of statistical thinking.[i] Even more intriguing, Dickens draws upon it-narrative (also known as object-narrative or novel of circulation) as another model for Oliver Twist. It-narratives are one of many older forms that Dickens repurposed in crafting his novels. These picaresque tales are told from the perspective of an object—a guinea, a pincushion, a shoe, or other non-human object, or an animal or other living creature—that is circulated throughout diverse social settings, from owner to owner, in adventures that depict the object’s inability to direct its destiny as it rotates through a wide range of various roles and contexts.


[i] Charles Dickens, “Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything.” Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 2, October 1837, pp. 397-413.

A description of the miseries of a garreteer poet: taken from The History of Pompey the Little; or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog, by Francis Coventry (1751). By John June, printmaker. Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection, Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22528183

The typical it-narrative exposes the affective damages of circulating so briskly and powerlessly through a capitalistic, bureaucratic society. In Oliver Twist, the it-narrative and its object-protagonist apply moral pressure to the category of the statistical unit. Using this frame, Dickens can expose, dramatize, and condemn the utilitarian system that dissolves human identities and connections, and solidifies financial ones—for the role of an it-narrative is to show how the protagonist is not just an unthinking object. Indeed, Oliver eventually comes into focus as what Bill Brown calls a thing—an object that shows up the systems within which we act, by resisting our unthinking use.[i] Oliver’s very inertness allows him to resist those who seek to control or use him. He’s frustratingly inept, with a lot of crying and fainting, and his frail body keeps failing when faced with the rigors of chimney sweeping or crime.

Over time, Oliver becomes, in John Plotz’s terms, a “sentimental object”: he personifies a modern tension between what is on the one hand, common, commodified, indistinguishable, and exchangeable (like a guinea or lump of coal) and on the other hand, distinctive and sentimentalized.[ii] Because Oliver doesn’t quite function within a utilitarian narrative, his friends manage to pull him into a new narrative life where he becomes a proper subject and a protagonist. He finally achieves recognition as a particular young gentleman at the end of the novel—although even then he enters into this romantic role largely due to his inherited identity and the efforts of his friends Nancy, Rose, and Mr. Brownlow.

Overall, Dickens’s experiments with genre in Oliver Twist enable the work of the novel: to dramatize systemic oppression and to lift Oliver out of the brutal jurisdiction of the New Poor Law and propel him instead toward a more humane (though unlikely) horizon. When students learn about how genre relates to character and plot in Oliver Twist, they can more clearly see not just the novel’s social critique but also, more generally, how the stories we tell shape our work in the world.


[i] Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-22.

[ii] John Plotz, Portable Property (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), p. 28.

“I candidly confess I am growing afraid of Tiny”: Goldfish in the Late-Victorian Imagination

By Anika Zuhlke

In 1878, the Liverpool Mercury published a piece titled “Our Mysterious Goldfish.” In it, the writer, W.F.P., relates that they purchased three small goldfish for their outdoor pond. The fish were left outside during a series of frosts, and one perished. They were then transferred to an indoor globe, but the smallest, named Tiny, soon evinced signs of illness as well and was dutifully placed in a separate bowl in a warm corner of the kitchen. Tiny revived—only to leap into the coal box overnight, where he was found seemingly dead the next morning. Hours later, however, W.F.P. was astonished to find that Tiny was in fact alive, “battered and begrimed, like a prizefighter and coalheaver rolled into one.” “Surprised and incredulous” by this “marvellous return from death to life,” W.F.P. begs to submit Tiny’s case to a naturalist, asking how a “poor little goldfish in delicate health” could not only survive a tumble into the “unnatural” space of the coal scuttle, but “conduct and disport itself as if nothing unusual had happened” once returned to its bowl. “As for myself,” W.F.P. concludes, “I candidly confess I am growing afraid of Tiny … he is proving himself too much for us. Unless he amends and learns to live quietly and respectably, we shall be compelled to pack him off to the Brighton or some other aquarium.” W.F.P. no longer seems to know precisely what a goldfish is, or where it belongs. They survive “unnatural” spaces and, by extension, their nature is called into question; they are a case for the naturalist.

The Liverpool’s article was just one of many curious anecdotes about goldfish to surface in the periodical press in the UK and US from the 1870s to the 1910s. Newspapers reported instances of goldfish surviving leaps from their bowls, playing pranks on other species, and outliving their owners. Indeed, from the relatively tame assertions that goldfish never slept, that they could predict storms, or that they could be trained, to the more bizarre claims that they did not need to be fed, would not displace water, or could survive being frozen solid, periodicals conferred upon the goldfish a surprising range of abilities and hidden talents—some of which seemingly bent the laws of nature.

This flood of attention was in part triggered by a shift in how the goldfish was perceived. Earlier, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, goldfish were typically represented as timeless products of the “Orient,” emblematic of beauty, wealth and tradition. Common goldfish “are shaped pretty much like the Carp,” one eighteenth-century naturalist explained, and so their exoticism was tempered by a sense of familiarity (Edwards 209).

From George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds. Vol. 4, London, 1751, p. 209

By the 1870s and 1880s, however, the Victorians had been introduced to fancy goldfish breeds newly imported from the East. In comparison to common goldfish, which vary in colour and fin shape, and might have one or two tails, the morphological variability of fancy goldfish would have been astonishing: not only do many have globular bodies, and fins and tails that vary considerably in shape, size, and number, but several breeds boast distinctive structural traits such as protruding head growths or bulging “telescope” eyes.

Detail, “Photographing Aquarium,” from William T. Innes, Goldfish Varieties and Tropical Aquarium Fishes. Innes & Sons, 1917, p. 207, figure 156.
 
Detail, “Prizewinning Celestial Telescope Goldfish,” from William T. Innes, Goldfish Varieties and Tropical Aquarium Fishes. Innes & Sons, 1917, p. 208, figure 157.

While many commentators admired these new varieties for their beauty, others worried that they were unnatural aberrations, problematizing the “freaks and unusual developments” (“About Goldfish”), “bizarre forms,” and “hideously” and “enormously exaggerated” fins and eyes propagated by (foreign) breeders (“Keeping Gold Fish”). Human interference in the species’ development prompted consternation as reports circulated of egg-shaking, fin-shearing, and bizarre rearing conditions, and Darwin himself had difficulty distinguishing between the goldfish’s “variations” and “monstrosities” (296-97). No longer simply the pretty and placid parlour ornament of the preceding century, the figure of the goldfish had become more complex, caught somewhere between nature and artifice, tradition and change, familiarity and “other,” and containment and transgression.

My article, “Frames of Glass: Goldfish and Gender in Paint, Performance, and Print, 1870-1914,” takes up this stream of discourse where it intersects with late-century gender debates.  Drawing upon examples from fine art, novels, popular journalism, travel writing, and theatre, I examine how goldfish were used to grapple with shifting patterns of femininity at a time when the Woman Question was inflected by biologically deterministic arguments about women’s “natural” societal roles. By drawing (or disrupting) analogies between women and goldfish, artists and writers explored questions about the nature of women, the extent to which the natural order was being eroded or endorsed by change, and the possibility that women would increasingly compete with men. By analysing this hitherto unexamined alternative to the “bird in the cage,” my study of the goldfish and its bowl provides insight into how the Victorians’ confrontations with other species encouraged them to look more critically at themselves.

Works Cited

“About Goldfish.” Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 24 July 1897.

Darwin, Charles. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. 1868. Cambridge UP, 2010.

Edwards, George. A Natural History of Uncommon Birds. Vol 4, London, 1751.

“Keeping Gold Fish.” Milwaukee Journal, 25 Aug. 1888.

W. P. F. “Our Mysterious Goldfish.” Liverpool Mercury, 12 Apr. 1879. British Library Newspapers.

CFP: “Victorian Energies: Sucrocultures, Carbocultures, and Petrocultures in the Long Nineteenth Century”: Victorian Review Special Issue

Proposal Deadline: September 1, 2024
Paper Submission Deadline: April 1, 2025

Gang of Coal-Whippers at Work Below Bridge, 1861, from Mayhew, Henry “London Labour and the London Poor”, III, 1861. Unknown engraver. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This special issue revises the history of energy production and consumption through the cultural, imaginative, and infrastructural forms of Victorian literature. As scholars continue to live through the ruin of fossil fuels unlocked in industrial Britain, the special issue asks what analytics are most appropriate to studying the carbon era’s dawn. What historicist, strategically presentist, and trans-imperial methods best illuminate the Victorians’ new ecologies of fossil-fueled existence? How did Victorian writers rehearse the energy impasses of our time, and what might we salvage from their work in imagining more regenerative futures?

Central to the journal issue is an efflorescence of work on resources such as coal, peat, whale oil, petroleum, and natural gas in the energy humanities and petrocriticism. This will be the first special issue to synthesize the groundbreaking insights of the energy humanities with those of Victorian studies. Its starting point—scholars including Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Grahame Macdonald observe—is that historical regimes of fuel are not only geopolitical, technological, and economic; they are also cultural constructs shaped by widely shared dreams and desires. Essays might examine the signatures of oil, tallow, or coal in texts that are not self-consciously concerned with energy—for example, petroleum in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) or peat in Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885). The editor particularly welcomes work attentive to the shaping force of energy in ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationhood: anti-Blackness and coal in Frederick Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), for instance, or white womanhood and whale oil in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). The editor also welcomes approaches that take a global view across multiple geographies of subjugation and resistance—linking, for example, sites of sugar and petroleum production in British-controlled Trinidad with sister sites in the US and Russian empires.

Historical concepts of energy are never neutral or uncontested, as Clara Daggett points out in The Birth of Energy. They are artifacts of social struggles at the heart of liberal-capitalist modernization, struggles that endure in the way we live now. This special issue aims to elucidate those energetic concepts and struggles from their natality.

Proposals of 100 words are due by September 1, 2024. Full essays of 5,000 – 8,000 words (inclusive of notes) will be due April 1, 2025 and will be evaluated by an anonymous peer reviewer and VR’s editorial board.

Kindly direct queries and proposals to the guest editor, Michael  Tondre: michael.tondre@stonybrook.edu.

Bodily Feelings, Clothing’s Materiality, and Self-Fashioning in Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859)

Ge Tang, University College Dublin

Anthony Trollope. ca. 1859-1870. Courtesy of Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/pk02cp74z. 

In this photograph stands Anthony Trollope fully clad in black: a black vest buttoned-up, black trousers, black shoes, and a long frock coat. The colour and tight cut of his attire reflect the prevailing men’s fashion of his era which celebrated a sense of discipline, moral integrity, and professionalism. His penetrating gaze complements the severity and solemnity of his attire. This photograph of Trollope (and, in fact, his other surviving photographs and portraits) suggests his acute awareness of this clothing culture, as well as his determined efforts to harness its symbolic power in gentle society. Yet, I cannot help but also notice the slightly strained fabric of the vest and the coat that pulls across his midsection. The close-fitting cut does not appear to suit Trollope’s stout figure, likely restricting his movement and inducing some bodily discomfort. How would his sensory experiences with attire inflect his ideas of sartorial symbolism? My Victorian Review article explores Trollope’s heightened consciousness of his clothing’s materiality in his travelogue The West Indies and the Spanish Main, born out of his Caribbean trip, highlighting the interconnected agentic forces of his clad body, his attire, and the tropical environment. I show how Trollope’s bodily feelings induced by clothing’s materiality in the tropics prompted him to rethink its cultural meanings, while it also shaped and reshaped his sartorial practices during his travels.

Trollope sailed to the Caribbean in November 1858 for a mission assigned by the British post office, which he had served for more than a decade. He was tasked to negotiate with authorities in Jamaica and British Giana for the transfer of colonial post offices to local control, while he also needed to persuade Spanish possessions in Cuba and Puerto Rico to lower the fees for forwarding mail (Super 100). Given his mission’s significance for building imperial connectivity, diplomacy in his attire was as crucial as diplomacy in his negotiations with high-standing colonial figures. In addition, to show courtesy to the British Caribbean society with whom he mingled, Trollope was expected to follow the sartorial style they had transplanted from home to retain “Englishness” in the tropics. We hear Trollope complain in the travelogue that he “must appear in black clothing, because black clothing is the thing in England” (45). Yet, neither the heat-absorbing colour of black nor the fit of his attire were appropriate for the oppressive tropical heat and humidity faced by Trollope. Driven by his bodily discomfort in unbreathable, black dress, Trollope sensibly, and emotionally, condemns this cultural transplantation: “[i]f a black coat, &c., could be laid aside anywhere as barbaric, and light loose clothing adopted, this should be done here” (45).

My article highlights that  Trollope’s attire exerts  an agentic force over his inappropriately clad body through clothing’s materiality, especially the colour, the fit induced, and the texture. Attire- bodily discomfort under the heat promotes him to recognize the materiality of clothing and the importance of adapting it to the environment. In Spanish Town, Jamaica, Trollope disregards the warning that “The Governor won’t see [him] in that coat,” visiting him without changing it for a socially approved one (45).  He recalls with pride, “The Governor did see me” (45). His standing as a representative of the British Empire certainly enables him to bend local sartorial rules to privilege bodily comfort. Contending with heat-induced digestive discomfort and even physical breakdown, Trollope turns to alternative forms of clothing to fashion his English masculinity and to assert symbolic mastery of a foreign land already colonized by Britain. His attempt, however, as demonstrated in my article, is thwarted by tropical ecosystems that demand him to contemplate and even recognize the land’s environmental and cultural alterity. 

References

  • Super, Robert Henry. The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope. University of Michigan Press, 1988.
  • Trollope, Anthony. The West Indies and the Spanish Main. 6th ed., Chapman and Hall, 1867.

Making Mrs Oliphant’s Dress (1878)

By Dr. Emma Ferry

Barely suppressing squeaks of excitement in the hushed atmosphere of the Manuscripts Reading Room in the British Library, I squinted my way through Margaret Oliphant’s letters to and from her editors at Macmillan about her book on dress. This was my fifth foray into the Macmillan Letterbooks to investigate the ‘Art at Home Series’, but easily the most entertaining.

The ‘Art at Home’ Series motif designed by Harry Soane c. 1876

Here, among these huge volumes of correspondence were the details of Oliphant’s initial commission; non-committal discussions about the book’s subject; gentle reminders about intended deadlines and abject apologies about inevitable delays; worries about its illustrations; plaintive enquiries about the author’s fees; and, finally, the receipts for both manuscript and payment.  Risking my eyesight, I painstakingly transcribed Oliphant’s appalling handwriting to piece together the story of the book’s publication, which appeared as part of Art at Home Series in both the UK and USA in 1878.

The front covers of Mrs Oliphant’s Dress (1878)
Published in London by Macmillan & Co., and in Philadelphia by Porter & Coates
Margaret Oliphant  
Chalk sketch by Frederick Augustus Sandys (1881)
NPG 5391 © National Portrait Gallery, London

While this aspect of the book’s production was there to find among the carefully catalogued letters, tracking down the content, both textual and visual, was even more enjoyable. It became a delightful game to identify the ‘materials’ from which her Dress was made. Ranging from Chaucer to Carlyle and from Pope to Punch, Oliphant’s book was as much a journey into English fiction as it was into English fashion. Addison’s articles from The Spectator were patchworked with Spenser’s Faerie Queene while Herrick’s sensuous poems were woven together with Ruskin’s prurient advice to young women. Her own writings, carefully unpicked from novels, reviews and opinion pieces, were also re-fashioned, padded out with the antiquarian costume books of Planché and Fairholt through which she rummaged to find suitable examples of dress from the past. Resulting in less than helpful suggestions for those anxious to know what to wear, Dress is peopled with fictional and factual characters notable for their sartorial sensibilities or silliness: the Wife of Bath and Captain Bobadil are paraded alongside Sir Walter Raleigh and Oliver Goldsmith. All in all, this was a delightful dip into the button-box and ragbag of Oliphant’s literary and historical interests, with the poems and plays quoted from at length quickly identified using simple online searches: thank you Google!

Similarly, the illustrations, provided by Richard Holmes, Queen Victoria’s Librarian, were also copied from original images with varying degrees of success. Ranging from miniatures and portraits in the Royal Collection to contemporary fashion plates published in Harper’s Bazaar, these provided even less useful advice for the intended reader. However, tracking them down was a real pleasure.  Hours spent searching through the online image collections of the Royal Collection Trust, the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery is never time wasted. Imagine the satisfaction of discovering the originals, still recognizable even allowing for Holmes’ lack of skill with his pen.

Illustrations from Dress by Richard Holmes (1878)

Having unpicked Oliphant’s Dress in my article, I have aimed not to ‘depreciate’ the author by showing where she found her ‘finest lines and most powerful effects’, but to explain how the book was made. If Mrs Oliphant were one of my students, we probably would be discussing academic misconduct and at least more effective use of careful referencing! Combining correspondence with a close reading of Oliphant’s text, my analysis challenges the prevailing view among dress historians that Oliphant was an ardent dress reformer and reveals her skills at writing with scissors.

George Gissing’s Microscript, New Grub Street, and the Scalar Economics of the Late-Victorian Literary Marketplace

by Sean Mier

Photo of the manuscript of Gissing’s short story “The Firebrand,” cut into slips for typesetting, with compositors’ markings, showing Gissing’s microscopic hand. George Gissing, “The Firebrand,” Autograph MS, Undated but [June 1895], Box 1, Gissing Papers, 1863-1958, Lilly Library Archives, Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, IN, 1 May 2017. Photograph by Zach Downey. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Compared to the shapely legibility of George Gissing’s earlier writings, the drafts of New Grub Street (1891), notably, and all his manuscripts that would follow instead showcase a uniquely miniaturized hand, nearly illegible to the naked eye, each page crammed with tiny words. While I was exploring the historical archives in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington for the first time, Gissing’s microscopic holographs provoked in me a new mode of inquiry, akin yet distinct from hermeneutical approaches and even from analyses of textual revision and variation over time. Instead, the archive revealed a compositional landscape in which the materiality of Gissing’s handwriting seemed to contribute to textual meaning just as much as linguistic, narrative, and/or generic considerations might have allowed. Why would an already published author like George Gissing abruptly change his handwritten style in such a dramatic way years into his professional career? Was his adoption of a miniscule handwriting an individual quirk or rather a response to an external demand from the literary marketplace?

In the essay, I argue that Gissing’s compositional idiosyncrasy fittingly concretizes many of the same anxieties expressed in his contemporaneous, self-conscious three-volume novel about the state of professional authorship near century’s end. Specifically, H.G. Wells claimed that Gissing’s adoption of a microscopic hand allowed him to visually conceptualize and measure the length of a manuscript as he was in the process of drafting it. Gissing used the miniaturized form to more efficiently calculate the average words per line and page of manuscript, thereby compressing larger scales of text into more measurable/manageable units. Furthermore, as you will see, Gissing’s handwritten form that ostensibly standardized word count per page reflected his ambivalent loyalty and hesitant conformity to the reigning system of the three-volume or triple-decker novel, which, in comparison with other nineteenth-century print forms, relied on amassing large quantities of words as a standard of profitability and intelligibility.        

Conventionally, we have been taught that the Victorian compulsion for verboseness and long-form texts was a response to both economic and novelistic trends (think Dickensian seriality). But while Gissing’s adoption of a microscopic handwritten form around 1890 confirms these suppositions, it also uniquely exposes how large-scale forces infiltrated and altered an author’s everyday writing practices. Richard Salmon, among others, has articulated the historical-cultural transition from the Romantic notion of the author as a literary genius to the Victorian phenomenon of the author as a writing professional, but my article highlights how late-nineteenth-century macroeconomic dynamics engendered a comparable expression on the individual level, shifting control over textual forms and sizes from the individual author to the coercive techniques of the publishing industry.

Yet the Gissing microscripts and the history of their subsequent transference into print formats also complicate this ostensibly one-sided transaction. My essay explores how Gissing’s drafts not only conformed to the publishing conventions of the time, but also how they intervened within these very same institutions—self-reflexively calling attention to the material absences usually effaced in the transformation from a private to a public textual format. The archive reveals how Gissing’s New Grub Street, for example, sustains a commitment to the occluded labour of Victorian writers under the reigning triple-decker print economy. Critics have already deemed the novel as semi-autobiographical in its reflection of a writer’s (Gissing’s) struggle to survive as a professional author, but the essay binds the material archive with the narrative context, extending the analysis to the minutiae of Gissing’s writerly practice. Gissing’s microscopic handwriting impeded, to varying degrees, the transformation of his stories into commodities, slowing down or prolonging their time to publication. Gissing’s microscopic archival form bears witness to the print industry’s sway over authorial labour, but it simultaneously acts as a protest to the constraints of the three-volume’s predetermined size and form. Without Gissing’s miniaturized manuscripts, the novel becomes divorced from the material reality of its construction and distribution. My archival analysis refuses to disremember the authorial labour that preceded the novel’s consumption as a commodity. Gissing’s microscript inserts the material constraints of novelistic production and authorial toil upon the commodity-form’s state of fictional amnesia.         

For more see: Mier, Sean. “Size Matters: George Gissing’s Microscript and the Late-Victorian Print Market.” Victorian Review, vol. 48 no. 2, 2022, p. 249-269. Project MUSEdoi:10.1353/vcr.2022.a900626.

Making Sense of What We See (or don’t see!): Disability in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Olivia Abram

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Color lithograph by National Printing & Engraving Company, 188?. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

In my time as an English Language Arts teacher, one of my favourite texts to teach was Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde–for reasons beyond the fist bumps and high fives celebrating its manageable length. Strange Case is approachable, engaging, and was a perfect culminating book-length study in my unit on mood and tone. Eurowestern readers of Strange Case will almost certainly have at least an idea of the storyline: one man is both the upstanding Jekyll and the evil Hyde; he transforms between identities using an experimental concoction until one day, he becomes stuck as Hyde and perishes, having pushed beyond the boundaries of science. The fears percolating in the Victorian public at the time Stevenson is writing—of the unknown, the dark side of human and “progress,” and, of course, the Other—remain relevant for 21st century readers.

Many have interpreted and problematically pathologized the central characters Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde as a single subject, assuming both subjects’ consciousnesses reside in the same human body.[1] As such, Strange Case has been described as a Victorian construction of A) mental illness[2] or B) the deepest, darkest, regressed parts of humanity.

Strange Case reflects the public and literary objective of the time: to “control, cure, or comprehend” otherness (Hingston 163). The growing association between disability and evil—and the developing fear of the potential of the human species to regress into primitive, animalistic, murderous beings—coincided with an increasing interest in and newfound ability to investigate and surveille. In Strange Case, Stevenson positions the text’s fear-inducing threat—that is, disability—as something strange to see, something that must be watched closely for the community’s stability.

One central tenet of writing of the time is an emphasis on looking. To read Strange Case more ethically and meaningfully, we must analyze modes of looking both exemplified and promoted in the text. Thought leader in disability justice and culture Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s thinking on staring can help us do so; in Staring: How We Look, she advocates for a replacement of the gaze (“an oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates”) with the stare, “an intense visual exchange that makes meaning” (9). Reading works about disability often places the reader and the disabled subject in an asymmetrical power relationship of interpreter (looker) and interpreted (looked at), respectively. The idea of staring, when applied to reading methods, can promote a more ethical approach to engaging with disabled characters. But you might be asking, how do texts encourage (or discourage) readers and characters to look? Some texts, especially suspenseful ones, don’t let us see much—subjects are left mysterious often on purpose. More ethical reading, here, of disability, requires an attention to interpreting what/how we do “see


[1] Spoiler alert: like other scholars working within Disability Studies, I read Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde as separate subjects. 

[2]For scholarship that diagnoses or pathologizes Hyde and/or Jekyll, see Angela Smith (epilepsy); Anne Stiles (double-brain); Altschuler and Wright, Oates (substance dependence); Royeka Sarker (dissociative identity disorder). As Kylee-Anne Hingston notes in her chapter on the text, Strange Case has, since its publication, become synonymous with DID, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia (McNally and Mathiasen are cited in Hingston 165).

For more see Olivia Abram. “Seeing and Surveilling Disability: Ethics and Modes of Looking in R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Victorian Review, vol. 48 no. 2, 2022, p. 309-326. Project MUSEdoi:10.1353/vcr.2022.a900629.

Mind and Reason in Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall

by Rebecca Sheppard

Robert Sayer, “The Comforts of Matrimony: A Smoky House & Scolding Wife” (1790)

What’s with blaming Helen for her husband Arthur’s increasingly bad behaviour? Going back to the first reviews of Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) Helen has been chided for her “self-willed rashness” (“Tenant” [Sharpe’s] 182) and her bad decision “to link herself … [with] a sensual brute” (“Tenant” [Rambler] 65). More recently, literary critics condemn Helen’s “superior attitude” (Jackson 204), “incessant lecturing” (Langland 143), and “special arrogance” (McMaster 355). Was it, though, Brontë’s intention to chastise the wife, or are we meant to take a longer look at the path Arthur has chosen for himself leading to his own demise (and death)?

In the novel, Helen’s diary serves two purposes: to exculpate herself for the crime of leaving her husband (legally, she is at fault) and to serve as a model for Gilbert, whose behaviour is in need of modification. Helen includes a detailed account of her four-year cohabitation with Arthur: an excruciating, monotonous litany of emotional abuses. Arthur’s progressively atrocious behaviour speaks to each objective. There is a rather large qualification to make here, however. Arthur’s violence is in his words and deeds (such as forcing alcohol on his young son and destroying Helen’s paintings); it is not physical. Nevertheless, Brontë asks us to draw parallels between physical abuse (both spousal and Gilbert’s attack on Mr. Lawrence) and Arthur’s immoral conduct. The mid-nineteenth century saw an increase in domestic abuse cases tried in courts of law. There was in the law, concurrently, a newer emphasis on reason and rationality as the standard for cases involving provocation.

Ashton, Ellen. “The Scolding Wife.” Reynold’s Miscellany of Romance, General Literature,
            Science, and Art, vol. 15, no. 388, 1855, p. 333.

And what do we learn from Arthur? Wildfell Hall was written at a time when crime was seen primarily as a moral failing; individuals with deficient character broke the law. Within the legal domain, individuals were increasingly seen as rational and responsible beings who ought to be held accountable for their decisions. Arthur’s gradual deterioration—both physical and moral—is attributed to the structure of his mind and his alcoholism, both of which were thought to be in an individual’s control. Arthur’s dying words— “Oh, Helen, if I had listened to you, it never would have come to this! And if I had heard you long ago—oh God! How different it would have been!” (TWH 367)—are an acknowledgement that absolves Helen of responsibility for her husband’s decline.

Arthur’s conduct also serves a model. Brontë shows no sympathy for Gilbert’s physical assault on Mr. Lawrence. He acts out while in a passionate state of mind; however, he should have known better. Unlike a “reasonable man,” he has not controlled his emotions, something he must learn to do in order to become a suitable partner for Helen. While Gilbert can and does improve, Arthur has a deteriorating ability to be reasonable. In keeping with the more conservative aspects of the law Brontë, restricts responsibility for one’s actions to include a degree of accountability for one’s past moral deeds. The “moralizing subtext,” which Martin Wiener locates in the law—the “hardly questioned acceptance of strengthening self-discipline, foresight, and reasonableness of the public” (83)—plays out in the novel.

The novel is less of a conduct manual for wives to be less nagging; rather, it is a condemnation of men to behave better in full accordance of the changing nineteenth-century legal standards.

For more see: Sheppard, Rebecca. “”You Have Only Yourself to Blame”: Mind and Reason in Anne Brontë’s: Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Victorian Review, vol. 48 no. 2, 2022, p. 207-224. Project MUSEdoi:10.1353/vcr.2022.a900624.

Bibliography

Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Oxford UP, 2008.

Jackson, Arlene. “The Question of Credibility in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

            English Studies, vol. 63, no. 1, 1982, pp. 198–206.

Langland, Elizabeth. Anne Brontë: The Other One. Barnes & Noble, 1989.

McMaster, Juliet. “’Imbecile Laughter’ and ‘Desperate Earnest’ in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

            Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 1982, pp. 352–68.

“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” The Rambler, Sept. 1848, no. 3, pp. 65–66.

“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Sharpe’s London Magazine, July 1848, no. 7, pp. 181–83.

Wiener, Martin J. Reconstructing the Criminal. Cambridge UP, 1990.

Victorian Comfort Books and the Ideal Dead Child

by Mary Gryctko

“At Rest.” George Cattermole, illustration from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841).

Dead children like Charles Dickens’s Little Nell (picture above on her deathbed) were a staple of sentimental Victorian fiction, to the point that even contemporaries apparently found it a tired enough trope to mock (see Oscar Wilde’s famous, if maybe apocryphal, quip that one “would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”). Many Victorians enjoyed these texts unironically, however, which is attested to by the eagerness of parents to apply sentimental scripts to their own children’s deaths. Postmortem photographs and texts written by bereaved parents show the ways in which sentimental scripts influenced parents’ perception and performance of “correct” mourning, but they also show how sentimental fiction reflected the actual changing value of the child in the Victorian era.

“Comfort books,” texts written by and for bereaved parents in nineteenth-century Great Britain and the US, offer a unique insight into the ways in which bereaved parents interacted with and adopted sentimental scripts in their own mourning processes. What struck me most about these texts when I first encountered them was how impersonal they tend to be: how much the parents/authors who wrote them relied on scripts laid out by sentimental fiction, rather than on memories of a real person who died. Most comfort book subjects are not newborns, yet parents’ apparent memories of their child almost invariably focus on (sometimes difficult to believe) accounts of the child’s goodness, and on the beauty of the child’s body, stressing racialized markers of beauty like blond hair and blue eyes. Echoing Dickens’s description of the dead Nell, many comfort book authors insist that their dead children are more beautiful in death than they were in life—the unnamed author of “The Dead Child ” (included in Walter Aimwell’s 1870 collection Our Little Ones in Heaven) puts it bluntly: “Few things appear so beautiful as a young child in its shroud” (107).

Rather than mourning a lost loved one, these texts often seem to celebrate the fact that the child will never grow up, and will instead be frozen forever in an idealized, passive form. Comfort books echo sentimental fiction in depicting dead children as ideal children. The child subjects of these texts are described as precious in a way that their siblings who grow up—and grow out of their parents’ control—cannot be. Authors frame child death not as losing a family member, but as gaining an eternal infant. Belief that this preservation was often literal—many comfort books authors (and Victorian protestants in general) believed that they would meet their children again, at the age at which the died, in heaven. These authors imagined a heaven in which power structures between parents and children that were temporary in real life were made permanent: a paradise for parents that relied upon the eternal subjugation of their children.

This notion of the dead child as an ideal child reflects the tension between the new figure of the innocent, unproductive child, and the realities of Victorian childhood. The Victorian cult of the child framed children as emotionally precious luxury items (as they are typically seen today), rather than as people who could provide physical help around the house/farm, financially, or in old age. Comfort books show parents grappling with how their own children, and their relationships with their children, can be made to fit into this new, bourgeois notion of childhood. The dead child fit neatly into this figuration in a way that no living child could.

For more see Mary Gryctko, “”The Sweetest Little Thing That Ever Died:” Nineteenth-Century Comfort Books and the Creation of the Immortal Child.” Victorian Review, vol. 48 no. 2, 2022, p. 293-308. Project MUSEdoi:10.1353/vcr.2022.a900628.

Curry and Rebellion: G.F. Atkinson’s Curry and Rice

by Meghna Sapui

Plate 29, “Our Cook Room.” Illustration by G.F. Atkinson, Curry and Rice (London: Day and Son, 1859)

The first restaurant I ever went to in the United States was the Chipotle on Archer Road in Gainesville, FL. Here, I asked the server to add capsicum and onions to my bowl. At this, the server looked baffled. It occurred to me then that Americans call bell peppers what Indians call capsicum. Understanding (I got my bell peppers) and laughter (I suppose capsicum can sound vaguely sexual) ensued. For an Indian woman with a bowl of rice, beans, and capsicum in a Tex-Mex chain, this was also a good reminder that I needed to get on with my American. Cultural differences can feel particularly immediate and forceful when they intervene in one’s alimentary practices.

But I am hardly the first to notice this—nineteenth-century colonial authors often faced the same predicament. The British empire in South Asia was a diasporic enterprise. A substantial part of this imperial diaspora’s lifeworld was marked by gustatory encounters and exchanges, skewed as they were by the politics of race and empire. Unsurprisingly then, culinary and gustatory representations recur in texts by Anglo-Indians (a term that in the nineteenth century denoted British residents in India). An instance of one such text is George Francklin Atkinson’s illustrated book Curry and Rice (1858) that uses an extended food conceit to talk about India—“her Majesty’s Eastern dominions,” newly minted as such following the Revolt of 1857.

Curry and Rice was written and published in the months following the Revolt, a time when narratives of 1857 constituted the bulk of English-language literature from India. Atkinson, a captain in the Bengal Engineers, a unit of the Company’s army in Bengal , had first-hand experience of 1857. However, Curry and Rice elides any mention of the Revolt. Atkinson declares in his preface that he wishes to provide a reprieve “after all the narratives of horror that have of late fallen upon the English ear.” Thus, the book constitutes of brief vignettes of life in a fictional cantonment town called Kabob. It depicts characters named after Indian foods—Garlic, Turmeric, Huldey, Tamarind, Coriander, and even a Capsicum(!)—and “Indian” scenes, like a tiger hunt, a “burra khanah” (“big dinner”), a cantonment ball, a dinner with the Nuwab of Kabob, and so on.

Atkinson’s choice of medium—an illustrated book—can be attributed to his training as an illustrator, as proficiency with pencil and Indian ink were admission prerequisites at the Company’s military seminary in Addiscombe. His professional and artistic career was also a continuation of a familial tradition. He was one of six children of the renowned Orientalist James Atkinson. Atkinson senior was well known for his English translations of Persian poetry as well as his literary endeavors and friendships with other Orientalists like James Prinsep, Horace Hayman Wilson, and Charles D’Oyly—he even named one of his sons Charles D’Oyly Atkinson! (A little aside: to this day, I have never found an image of any of the Atkinsons except James.) Among James Atkinson’s many translations, the following are some of the most popular ones: the first independent English translation of the Rostam and Sohrāb episode of the Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, an eventual abridged version of the entire epic, and Nizami Ganjavi’s Laila and Majnun.

While George Francklin’s literary output is not as prolific as his father’s, their works share similar themes. For instance, both write about the peculiarities of the Anglo-Indian experience—James in his melancholic City of Palaces, G.F. in his humorous Curry and Rice. Both write about imperial wars—James wrote and published extensively about his experiences in the First Afghan War, G.F. wrote The Campaign in India, 1857-1858 about 1857. Given his personal and professional background, it is fascinating that following the imperial event that became the boogeyman of the nineteenth-century imperial imaginary, G.F. wanted to write Curry and Rice which was advertised as “the best Christmas gift book.”

Atkinson dedicates Curry and Rice to W.M. Thackeray: “My tiny vessel is to follow in the wake of your big men-of-war.” Thackeray was considered something of an authority on all things Anglo-Indian—born in Kolkata, he thanked Atkinson for writing about his “native country.” Thackeray was also a popular Victorian gourmand who in “Memorials of Gormandizing” declared: “remember that every man who has been worth a fig in this world, as poet, painter, or musician, has had a good appetite: and a good taste.” For a book about India couched in the language of gustation, there could be no more appropriate interlocutor than Thackeray. Thackeray responded to Atkinson’s gesture with gratitude and a warning. He warned Atkinson about the pitfalls of publishing and the harm that a bad review could do, citing the 1852 Times review of The History of Henry Esmond. Curry and Rice in its turnreceived mixed reviews. Some found the timing of this humorous book vexing, appearing as it did so close to the events of 1857. Others reviewing it with its “companion” volume, The Campaign in India, thought it quite appropriate—praising both for their lithographs but finding Campaign much more palatable than Curry and Rice.

Curry and Rice uses the humorous and seemingly innocuous language of food—the residents of Kabob constitute the “curry and rice” dished out on the forty lithograph “plates.” This alimentary discourse, however, becomes politically supercharged when situated within the context of 1857, widely reported by the Anglo-Indian and British press as an affair of peregrinating chapatis, adulterated cartridges, and contaminated salt and flour sold in cantonment bazaars. While at first glance, the hapless Anglo-Indians of Kabob may also seem like inappropriate representational choices at a moment of such unrest, Atkinson’s book might not be as out-of-joint with its historical moment as it claims (or appears) to be. Curry and Rice is generously peppered with apparently jocular racial slurs, marked by the horrifically humorous specter of imperial appetites that miscegenate white bodies and families, and haunted by simian Indian servants who haunt Kabob’s gleaming, though stiflingly hot, dining rooms. All in all, Curry and Rice is a lesson in many things. It shows us how food can be deployed to overwrite imperial politics; how implicit racism is foundation to imperial genres, like Anglo-Indian satire; and how foodways can be useful in interpreting the political stakes and racial ideologies at work in imperial texts.

To read more, see Sapui, Meghna. “The Culinary and the Colonial in G.F. Atkinson’s Curry and Rice.” Victorian Review, vol. 48 no. 2, 2022, p. 225-248. Project MUSEdoi:10.1353/vcr.2022.a900625.