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This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.

In 1859 William Gladstone commissioned a painting from William Dyce which became known as Beatrice. A portrait of a young woman wearing a plain Renaissance dress, Beatrice is one of the first Victorian paintings depicting Dante's muse and reflects an obsession with Beatrice and the Vita Nuova, which is typical of the mid and late-Victorian reception of Dante. The Victorian Beatrice is usually associated with Pre-Raphaelite artworks, especially those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beatrices fit into either the category of the ‘beautiful dead woman’ or that of the male artist's cipher or projection screen. In contrast, the different Beatrices this chapter introduces possess a powerful and animate aura: they are alive, and the realm they inhabit is not so much a land of shadows, but the social environment of the Victorian here and now. The first part looks at her exploitation in Victorian literature, especially in the hands of John Ruskin, who saw Beatrice as a model for the behaviour of English women. In the second part, a critical response to such processes of idealization is discussed. George Eliot's Romola, a novel which consciously revises the use of a literary figure such as Beatrice, contains complex criticism of the kind of female idealization perpetuated by poetic traditions.

This book is about the connections between Victorian literature and the Victorian world of finance — its instruments, practices, theories, laws. The essays here explore relationships between the two activities of high capitalism and Victorian literary imagining, and ponder their cross-over narratives, cognate forms of thought, and interrelationships of discourses. Prominent discussions of literature and economics in the Victorian period have explored the two fundamentals of traditional economic theory in relation to art and art theory. However, the present book looks, broadly, at capitalism in the Victorian period from other angles because it moves beyond relations of production/consumption to the more complex structures of 19th-century advanced capitalism in its historical moment.

This introductory chapter sets out the focus of this book, namely the arguments over the meaning and interpretation of pain as they appeared in many different forms of literature — whether novels, medical textbooks, campaigning pamphlets, advertisements, or sermons — primarily in the last two decades of the 19th century. It traces the relationships between different understandings of physical pain by looking at the language and arguments of those who described it, and maps the changing perceptions of pain against specific medical, theological, anthropological, and technological developments.

This chapter studies how Charles Chesnutt's engagement with Victorian literature forms a plot of its own. This plot develops over time and ultimately brings to the surface aspects of this engagement that remain submerged in his earlier work. Chesnutt not only leverages Victorian literature to tell the stories he wants to tell but also takes a more critical stance toward his intertexts, probing and exposing shortcomings in their treatment of race. Borrowing the title of his last novel, then, the chapter suggests that Victorian literature is Chesnutt's quarry: both source and prey. Here, the double-edged nature of this engagement manifests itself most fully and strikingly when Chesnutt seizes on Victorian references to an identity as marginal and marginalized in that literature as it is central to his own writings: that of the racially mixed individual, the mulatto.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of two theories of originality. It identifies two contrasting cultural narratives to explain literary creation. One is a hallowed vision of creation as generation — which may be called creatio — the other a more pragmatic account of creation as rearrangement, which might be called inventio. The former conventionally connotes some brief, noumenal moment of afflatus or inspiration, while the latter has the tang of the atelier about it. The primary objective of the book is presented.

This book tells the life of Ernest Jones from birth to death, with the aim of reconstituting a plausible account of his activities, speeches, and writings. It serves as a corrective to the wilder things that Jones chose to tell about his life, and to some of the even wilder things that he suppressed. The book also gives an account of how Jones invented and retold his own life-story for political and literary effect, and in so doing achieved his only real success.

This chapter serves as a reminder that if finance was a ‘white, male, metropolitan, and middle-class’ discourse, then it was not uniformly so. Thinking specifically about matters of female influence in the public world, it argues that one of the consequences of literary critics' preoccupation with censuring capitalism is the failure to consider those Victorian women who made the most of financial opportunities available to them; specifically, those who benefited from and helped develop what is called the ‘Victorian culture of investment’. The chapter looks at women in fiction and in real life who, if not running financial institutions, made a significant contribution by investing in business. They acquired, in turn, financial responsibility and power in what might easily seem a male world.

This introductory chapter discusses how, over the course of the nineteenth century, an “intuitive” faith in an internalized sense of right and wrong came to take an increasingly prominent, if fraught, place in English moral life. It was “moralistic” figures like George Eliot—that is, novelists—who would provide the most lasting expression of this prominence. The compulsion of narrative, a reader's feeling of being drawn through a text, was a key term in the developing novel art of the nineteenth century. The metaphor of physical motion, which Victorians applied to the reading experience, came to offer a means of describing the movement from what is to what ought to be—or at least the yearning for that movement. At the same time, the moral valence that readers placed on the stories they read came to shape, in terms of both market forces and creative tradition, the principles that now define the well-plotted realist novel. By offering a fuller context for the ethical discourse of the British nineteenth century, this book argues that Victorian formalism was inextricably tied to moral thought. This not only impacts one's reading of Victorian literary and philosophical history but also offers a new perspective on one's own approaches to literature.

It has become a commonplace that pain defies language and, as such, that it is unique as a sensation that cannot be described or shared: sufferers suffer alone, unable to translate their physical pains into words. This chapter looks into the arguments of those who promote this line of reasoning, most notably Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry, and refutes their claims both theoretically and by arguing from the rhetorical strategies of Victorian writers. The flaw in such arguments is that their proponents refuse to accept that pain can enter into language and be accommodated by its structures — whether descriptive or metaphorical — in the face of a paucity of directly expressive words for painful sensations. In response, the chapter schematizes the conventional attitudes towards physical pain, outside the realms of medicine and Christianity, that were open to the Victorian sufferer and writer.

This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines Victorian drama and its dealings with risk and liability. Here, The Poor of New York is presented as a striking example of a wider issue: the dramatization of scenes from advanced capitalism, particularly the transformation of financial danger into theatrical display, which occurred diversely on the Victorian stage. Analysing interwoven financial relationships, the chapter establishes the common elements of trust, illusion, and deceit that bound capital and drama together and which were knowingly exploited to produce what is called the ‘capitalist aesthetics of Victorian sensation culture’. The cultural form of 19th-century drama is uncannily like capital itself because it is ‘built on appearances, characterised by insoluble contradiction, and defined by extreme forms of distortion’: in the age of high capitalism, drama accordingly acquired a peculiar diagnostic power.

This afterword explores how the arguments in this book relate to the question of literary periodization. This is, without question, a book on Victorian literature, written in the context of Victorian moral thought. From that point of view, it is very much rooted to a specific time and place. On the other hand, many of the arguments and theoretical ideas in this book rely on a certain concept of realism that would seem to extend beyond Britain and beyond the nineteenth century. The closing thoughts of this chapter consider just how much of the book's argument is portable to a larger discussion of literary realism. In so doing, the afterword hopes to elaborate the ways in which the Victorian novel, and the moral thought that attached to it, has continued to influence people's larger sense of how works from the past can seem to be, in some odd way, about them.