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Wandering through “Pagan” Wiltshire with Richard Jefferies

By Dr. Jeff Swim

Visiting “the Old House at Coate:” The birthplace of Richard Jefferies. Now the site of the delightful Richard Jefferies Museum, which is as much of a community hub for celebrating local ecology and culture as it is a museum commemorating the author.

My article in the latest issue of the Victorian Review (49.2) looks at the convergence of archaeology, ecology, and pagan revivalism in the works of Richard Jefferies. Jefferies’ youth was spent walking the hills and fields of Wiltshire, especially in the regions around “the old house at Coate,” the Jefferies’ family farm in Swindon. During these walks, Jefferies became intimate with the ecological and archaeological significance of the countryside. This intimacy is demonstrated in essays such as “The Pageantry of Summer” and books such as The Story of My Heart. For Jefferies, the enduring prehistoric earth and stone works of Wiltshire, such as the Iron Age Hillfort Liddington Castle, and geoglyphs, such as the Uffington Whitehorse, become sites of deep feeling and metaphysical contemplation.

My essay examines Jefferies’s inclinations towards pagan prehistory. Jefferies’ interest in paganism is distinct from the Neo-Pagan movements that began in the Victorian period and branched into new religious movements such as Wicca. The latter tend towards a consistent, ritualistic, and religiously observant way of experiencing the sacred and the supernatural, whereas Jefferies’s affiliation with paganism is looser and more experimental; his is a “pagan sentiment” akin to that which Walter Pater elaborates in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (99), but one which is grounded in the chalky earth of Wiltshire as opposed to the stony ground of the Grecian islands. Jefferies’ less structured, more intuitive evocation of pre-Christian forms of feeling and belief expresses a personal ethos of feeling compelled by his experiences near local “pagan” prehistoric sites. Thus, I refer to this stylistic strategy as an affectation of paganism to draw attention to the blend of play and intensity of authentic experience Jefferies conveys. In short, I argue that for Jefferies “paganism” is more of an aesthetic sensibility than a strictly spiritual or religious domain of experience.

Jefferies’ favorite writing station in the attic of the farmhouse

For instance, in Amaryllis at the Fair (1887), Jefferies declares: “I am a pagan, and think the heart and soul above crowns” (20-21). My article details how this sentence demonstrates what I think is key to understanding Jefferies’s triangulation of the ecological, the archaeological, and the affective. For, in the context of the novel, he interjects with this puzzling declaration while contemplating the existential value of old, enduring things that have accrued affective resonance. To affiliate with paganism, for Jefferies, is to claim the term as a mode of feeling and experience that provides an alternative to both secular materialism and Christian transcendentalism.

Inspired by my research on Jefferies, my wife and I took a trip to England in the summer of 2024, intending to visit several of the prehistoric sites Jefferies writes about. Due to an unfortunate foot injury, I was unable to walk directly in Jefferies’s footsteps and visit all the places we hoped to (especially disappointing was that we missed Liddington Castle, Jefferies’ favourite haunt). However, we did visit several other places such as the Uffington White Horse, Avebury Stone Circle (which was not yet re-erected in Jefferies’ day), and the nearby Silbury Hill.

Listening to the stones at Avebury. These stones were not erect in Jefferies time, but the henge circle within which the village is set would have been well-known to him. A similar spirit of pagan revivalism moved the early twentieth century archaeologist Arthur Keiller to have the stones re-erected in the 1920s. This massive henge was built in the Neolithic period, some 4,500 years ago. They were knocked down and buried on-site during the Middle Ages, and the village of Avebury was established within.

Silbury Hill near Avebury, a Neolithic earthwork around which many legends have gathered.

I was especially curious to be in the presence of the tumuli that Jefferies writes about. For instance, in The Story of My Heart, Jefferies conjures the spirit of a prehistoric Briton interred within a burial mound he is resting atop, claiming to experience a slippage of temporality in proximity to this tumulus that allows him to “slip back the twenty centuries with the buried pagan warrior whose “spirit could endure from then till now, and the time was nothing” (63).

Dr. Christine Campana (my wife) standing atop a tumulus near Stonehenge. We waited for an ancient pagan spirit to disrupt our sense of temporality, but the bus back to Salisbury runs on a very strict schedule not even a wraith could delay.

While we were not able to visit some of the exact mounds Jefferies frequented (many are now apparently quite overgrown or on private property), we were able to get a sense of the kind of tumuli Jefferies writes about during our trip to Stonehenge.

It was while being in the presence of the Uffington White Horse, an iconic late Bronze Age geoglyph, that Jefferies’ appeals to prehistoric English paganism were clarified for me. In some ways, it confirmed my position on his pagan sensibility as not a consistent or coherent belief system or world view.

Standing atop the Horse looking to the horizon

The landscape which is so characteristic of rural Southwestern England took shape during the “Neolithic” period. Being atop the Uffington White Horse can move you to experience the land in a different way, urging you to feel the deep continuity of human habitation and connection to place this enduring figure commands. Being there clarified Jefferies’s affectations of paganism as a desire to feel with the deep past, an attempt to connect to something earthbound, rooted but cyclical: an awareness of the seasonality of the land. Yet it is also something that orients one’s vision to the horizon, the “wider horizon of feeling” Jefferies himself was searching for atop Liddington Hill (The Story of My Heart 30).

No one really knows what the Horse is meant to signify—or indeed, if it is a horse at all. Some local legends refer to it as “Dragon Hill,” site of the spot where St.George slew the dragon (itself a metaphor for a supposed triumph of Christianity over paganism). The White Horse is not, however, a stable monument like Stonehenge. In fact, if the Horse is not maintained by the local volunteers who scrape away the turf and expose the chalk in this particular shape, the whole thing may vanish within two or three decades. Thankfully, the ritual “chalking or ‘scouring’ the horse,” firmly noted as an already very ancient tradition by an 18^th century antiquarian, has been observed for several millennia (Cleaver).

The contours of the Uffington White Horse. I was unable to get a picture that captures the whole figure, but many arial images are just a web search away. These photos capture the perspective of those who come to re-scour it each year, as well as its elusiveness as it takes shape in the hillside. The ground must be re-etched in the same pattern annually.

The eye of the White Horse as it watches the seasons pass over the perpetually sheep and cattle-munched hills and valleys.

The Uffington White Horse also showed me that paganism, as it is expressed in Jefferies, is an aesthetic of the process of walking the countryside and seeing things scurry in and out of view as you proceed, of seeing lines and figures take shape as you move with them. We did get a glimpse of the Horse in full at a distance as we approached by car, and it certainly is striking in its full glory. Yet, it was the experience of walking with the chalk contours of the figure, seeing it in its snaking lines winding through the grass that really animated it. Being there brought this home to me: that Jefferies’s affiliations with paganism are the feelings of one being moved by a landscape that proclaims a sense of continuity with the deep past and instills a profound sense of the wonder of living with and near “prehistory.”

A Knitted Jefferies in the tearoom at the Jefferies Museum

In this sense, Jefferies is a pagan—and a pagan of a thoroughly modern sort. As Ronald Hutton points out, though there may not be definitive evidence of “survivals of paganism” in the form of intact belief systems, there are “pagan survivals”—imprints and intimations of pre-Christian, pre-modern, “prehistoric” ways of living and feeling (30-38). These survivals, like the Uffington White Horse, Avebury Stone Circle, and Stonehenge, both require and receive protection and maintenance. They still matter.

Richard Jefferies probably would not have joined a neo-pagan coven, but he certainly shared in the ecstatic enthusiasm for the ancient human-shaped landscape that draws so many contemporary pagans to it, observing and revering its weird will.

Petting the tireless withers of the White Horse

Works Cited:

Cleaver, Emily. “Against All Odds, England’s Massive Chalk Horse Has Survived 3,000 Years,” Smithsonian Magazine, 6 July 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/3000-year-old-uffington-horse-looms-over-english-countryside-180963968. Accessed 3 October 2024.

Hutton, Ronald. Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation, Yale UP, 2022.

Jefferies, Richard. The Story of My Heart as Rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams, (1883) 2014.—. Amaryllis at the Fair, Alan Sutton, (1887) 1992.

Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Oxford UP, 2010.

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

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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

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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

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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)

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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)

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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

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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 MUSE, doi: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

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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 MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2022.a900629.

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

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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 MUSE, doi: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

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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 MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2022.a900628.