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This chapter focuses on changes in society in the post-Victorian era as depicted in Irish novels. Topics covered include love and marriage, the changing frame of mind involving relations between men and women and the social representation of the male and female, and the competing ideas of Victorianism and modernity.

This chapter shows how Europe's colonial expansion and imperial economic exploitation contributed to the rise of European middle classes and at the same time shaped European bourgeois culture and values. It points out that Britain's nineteenth-century middle class was as much a product of imperial expansion and the integration of global markets as it was one of religious introspection or the politics of bourgeois respectability. The chapter reveals that the Victorian middle class made, and was made by, the domestic and imperial reform movements of the nineteenth century. Campaigns for reform in imperial governance, for the end of slavery in British colonies, and for the expansion of the British missionary movement shared practices, ideas, and key personnel with many vigorous domestic reform programs. The chapter locates the connections between the imperial and domestic faces of Victorian values in the history of Britain's place in an emerging global capitalism and points to the spread of “Victorianism” far beyond the British archipelago.

Between 1925 and 1935, three significant sheet music books for barbershop quartets were published to further aid in establishing and publicizing barbershop quartets and barbershop arrangements: Barber Shop Ballads, Close Harmony: Male Quartets, Ballads, and Funnies with Barber Shop Chord, and A Handbook for Adeline Addicts. The common thing about these books is that none of them accounted for the contributions of blacks to close harmony, they did not recognize some famous songs as having debuted as vaudeville quartets, and they regarded Tin Pan Alley songs as a commonwealth of only white Americans. Attention is also given to the idea of how amateurism plays a vital role in folk-music that is probably brought about by social change linked with neo-Victorianism. Soon after that however, barbershop harmonies were restored by the barbershop revival society.

Chapter 3 examines the political strategies white business owners and marketing agents employed in response to the black consumer activism of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Beginning in 1893, white authorities developed a Jim Crow strategy built around a defense of market values and public propriety, necessary regulations that they believed would prevent a wholesale disintegration of core capitalist principles and Victorian assumptions of respectability. In doing so, they attempted to make the segregation debate about political economy instead of race, castigating black consumer activism as a disruptive social act that threatened the popularity and financial growth of the region.

This chapter explores the ethics of neo-Victorian appropriation through close analyses of three Brontëan afterlives: novels by Emma Tennant (Thornfield Hall), Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Gail Jones (Sixty Lights). This chapter explores the impact of Charlotte Brontë’s writing upon the field of neo-Victorian fiction—and vice versa. How has Brontë’s Jane Eyre been reflected upon and invoked in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels about the Victorians, and with what range of textual and wider cultural effects? This chapter shows that re-workings of Jane Eyre often speak directly to the accreted meanings of prior neo-Victorian revisions (such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), as well as their critical contexts; reveals the way the allusive power (or broad communal meaning) of an archetypal text can be contingent upon the oversimplification of literary and cultural complexities; and contends that recent engagements with Brontë’s life and fiction by creative writers have much to reveal about nostalgia and our own cultural moment. A recognition of the nuances and unresolved tensions of the Victorian original is crucial in fostering a debate on the ethics of appropriation, particularly the question of whether certain neo-Victorian novels may best be seen as acts of respect or retaliation, nostalgia or theft, or something in between.

This chapter explores the character of Bertha Mason as a significant obstacle to writers and artists seeking to adapt Jane Eyre: to treat her in the same manner as Charlotte Brontë is to replicate her degradation on the grounds of sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and dis/ability. Focused upon portrayals of her appearance, madness and death, this chapter charts the evolution and variation of Bertha’s character from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracing the impact of feminist and postcolonial theorising upon creative engagements with Brontë’s novel. Encompassing a wide variety of adaptations across different media, including Young Adult and neo-Victorian fictions, film, television, theatre and the visual arts, it argues that recreations of Bertha point to an ongoing desire to recover this character from the margins of Brontë’s novel.

This chapter provides the first comparative reading of neo-Victorian fiction with the erotic makeover novel, a genre that realised commercial success in the immediate aftermath of the wild financial success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Individual makeovers exactly reproduce the text of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre; the only additional material are passages of explicit, often BDSM-inflected, sexual encounters. This chapter examines the brief flare of global interest in the erotic makeover in order to demonstrate the genre’s appropriation of academic neo-Victorian vocabulary. As this chapter argues, such appropriation is deployed in order to obfuscate opportunistic financial imperatives. A comparative reading of Sienna Cartwright’s erotic makeover of Jane Eyre with D.M. Thomas’s neo-Victorian novel Charlotte initiates a dialogue between the two genres across the topics of authorship, fan fiction, copyright law, literary originality and neo-Victoriana. Both genres provide Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre with a curiously commercial afterlife.

For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.

This essay discusses Virginia Woolf’s enduring fascination with the life of the acclaimed Victorian actor, Ellen Terry. Drawing principally on Woolf’s biographical writing on Terry—including both extant versions of her sole play, Freshwater, as well as a 1941 retrospective essay on Terry’s career—it argues that Woolf’s understanding of Terry pivots from a historical awareness of Terry’s position within the cultural and aesthetic divide between Victorianism and high modernism to a more challenging recognition of Terry’s persistent and ephemeral contemporaneity. In her reconceiving of Freshwater and her late essay, Woolf revises her own aesthetic ideals in order to show that Terry’s mode of acting provides an antidote to the ossification of value in the imprimaturs associated with modernist forms of celebrity.

This epilogue explores some developments and directions in theater's engagement with evolution in the Anthropocene epoch. It shows that theater continues to interact with evolutionary ideas, and remains a valuable site in general for artistically and intellectually wrestling with scientific ideas through its intimacy, immediacy, and communality. Theater can engage the mind and senses in a way that is unique and that is becoming, if anything, more vital in a fragmented digital culture. In fact, recent plays that engage evolution are pretty bleak about where we have arrived as a species and where we are headed. Playwrights are depicting human evolution in varying degrees of crisis, regression, and stasis, with the added element of threat posed by climate change. This epilogue also considers retro-Victorianism in theater's engagement with evolutionary thought and how playwrights in the Anthropocene epoch tackle themes such as genetics and epigenetics, zooösis, mimicry, interspecies performance, and climate change. Finally, it discusses the idealization of “theater as a badge of the human achievement of co-operative culture”.

The third chapter re-examines the spinster heroine of modernist fiction, focussing particularly on the widowed mother/repressed daughter and aunt/niece paradigms as examples of same-sex alliance and rivalry. Showing the influence of psychoanalytical models of the family, the widowed mother in novels by May Sinclair, F.M. Mayor and Lettice Cooper is a monstrous presence from whom the daughter must separate, in order to make the transition from an out-dated Victorianism to an uncertain modernity. Aunt figures are haunting presences in the modernist text. In the work of lesser-known middlebrow novelist E.H. Young, the challenge to heterosexuality posed by the tantular, and the uses of fantasy, offer playful alternatives to spinster narratives structured around repression.

This chapter argues that the call for “old-time religion” by big tent evangelists should not be understood as status anxiety, as fundamentalist doctrine, as small-town values, or as a call for a renewed Christian America. Rather, big tent revivalism’s old-time religion was a critique of late Victorianism, not an attempt to retain Victorian culture. Big tent revivalists accused the late Victorian church of replacing old-time religion with a passionless substitute, which was only concerned with etiquette, dignity, and social status. Disappointed in what they viewed as the loss of spiritual intensity by liberals and conservatives alike, many evangelists longed for old-time religion’s passion and authenticity.

This chapter puts forth the idea that while evangelists refused to abandon the language of moral commitment for therapeutic self-help, they embraced the larger impulses that these shifts represented: the eagerness to avoid pain (both physical and mental), the rejection of suffering as the will of God, and the need and desire for immediate mental well-being. The revivalists’ emphasis on faith cures, divine healing, and miracles drew large crowds to revivalist meetings, aiding them in the effort of spreading Christianity’s message. In contrast to the Victorian values of self-control or moral fortitude, healing evangelists upheld religious experience as the hallmark of religious devotion, marking a shift away from those old values, and toward the nascent consumer society.

This chapter looks at the widely popular film adaptation of Oliver! directed by Carol Reed. This globally successful adaptation reinforced the musical’s influence on the general perception of Oliver Twist, molding the cultural perception of the original novel in significant ways and shaping subsequent film and television adaptations, many of which chose to transform Dickens’s polemic into “family entertainment.” Though traditionalists decried this “Disneyfication” of Oliver Twist, the film version of Oliver! highlights the view of Victoriana in the postmodern era; Reed’s film emphasizes a “theme-park” style vision of Dickensian London that, though a simulacrum, is very much in keeping with the contemporary mass-cultural perception of Dickens’s era. The chapter concludes by assessing the influence of the film on subsequent revivals of the stage property, as the conventions of the contemporary “mega-musical” facilitated Cameron Mackintosh’s adaptation of Bart’s show into a cinematic “poperetta.”

The Victorians and their sexuality exert a hypnotic fascination over historians. In spite of historical revisionism, ‘Victorian’ remains a well-understood term for repressive attitudes, floating free from the chronological and geographical limits of Victoria’s actual reign. There have been distinctive shifts in the representation of Victorian sexuality. Initially, Victorianism represented the regime against which reformers were struggling. During the Sexual Revolution studies suggested seething lustful undercurrents beneath the respectable exteriors, and every few years a book appears which purports to reveal that the Victorians were just like ourselves in their enjoyment of sex. Are the Victorians a Rorschach test for changing contemporary ideas about sex and society, or does each generation create the Victorians it needs? The Victorians were numerous, and diverse, enough to provide a kaleidoscope of innumerable possibilities of sexual belief and behaviour and a well of contradictory stories.