Neo Victorianism The Victorians in The Twenty First Century 1999 2009 Compress

Neo-Victorianism
The Victorians in the Twenty-First

Century, 1999–2009
Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

Neo-Victorianism
10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08
Also by Ann Heilmann
FEMINIST FORERUNNERS
THE LATE-VICTORIAN MARRIAGE QUESTION

NEW WOMAN FICTION: Women Writing First Wave Feminism
NEW WOMAN HYBRIDITIES (co-edited with Margaret Beetham)
NEW WOMAN STRATEGIES: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird
Also by Mark Llewellyn
CONFLICT AND DIFFERENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

(co-edited with Dinah Birch)
Also by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn
THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF GEORGE MOORE: Gender and Genre
METAFICTION AND METAHISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING

Neo-Victorianism
The Victorians in the Twenty-First
Century, 1999–2009

Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

© Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn 2010
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Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: Neo-Victorianism and Post-Authenticity:

On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Appropriation 1
1 History, literature, and criticism 8
2 Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the
twenty-first century 28
3 Going forward, looking backward 32
1 Memory, Mourning, Misfortune: Ancestral Houses

and (Literary) Inheritances 33
1.1 Meta-morphoses: Classical, (early)modern, and
neo-Victorian echoes in Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2005) 37
1.2 ‘My mother not my mother; myself not myself’:
The mother (as) text in Sarah Blake’s
Grange House (2000) 41
1.3 ‘Tell me the truth’: Trauma, witnessing, and authorship
in Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006) 47
1.4 ‘There was something unheimlich about it’:
Familial/textual legacies and spectral returns in
John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) 55
1.5 Conclusion 63
2 Race and Empire: Postcolonial Neo-Victorians 66

2.1 Hybridity and resistance in Amitav Ghosh’s
Sea of Poppies (2008) 70
2.2 Voices across borders: Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008) 81
2.3 Orientalism and transculturalism: Ahdaf Soueif’s
The Map of Love (1999) and Kate Pullinger’s
The Mistress of Nothing (2009) 91
2.4 Conclusion 104
3 Sex and Science: Bodily and Textual (Re)Inscriptions 106

3.1 Scopophilia and paratextuality 110
3.2 Subaltern subversions: Jane Harris’s
The Observations (2006) 116
vii

viii Contents
3.3 Race, science, and the gaze: Barbara

Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003) 120
3.4 Reclaiming the (textual) body: Belinda Starling’s
The Journal of Dora Damage (2006) 131
3.5 Conclusion 140

4 Spectrality and S(p)ecularity: Some Reflections in the Glass 143
4.1 ‘[L]ights and shadows moving on the inside of
the windows’: Charles Palliser’s The Unburied
(1999) and Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows (2002) 150
4.2 ‘When Alice stepped through liquid glass’:
A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009) 156
4.3 ‘A pure-Victorian half-made window’: Rachel Hore’s
The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008) 163
4.4 ‘[T]here may be some truth in those tales’:
John Harwood’s The Séance (2008) 167
4.5 Conclusion 172
5 Doing It with Mirrors, or Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian

Metatextual Magic 174
5.1 ‘Are you watching closely?’: Christopher Nolan’s
The Prestige (2006) 178
5.2 The conjuror in the closet: Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) 184
5.3 Simulation and consciousness: Mind travel in Scarlett
Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006) 190
5.4 Death, resurrection, and cinematography in
Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (2006) and Steven
Millhauser’s ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990) 201
5.5 Conclusion 209
6 The Way We Adapt Now: or, the Neo-Victorian Theme Park 211
6.1 Victoriana World: TV, theme parks, and the object of
authenticity 213
6.2 ‘Memory fatigue’: The great (neo-)Victorian collection 220
6.3 From Lark Rise to Cranford and back again 226
6.4 ‘I’m not sure how much of a Dickensian I am really’:
The adaptive affinities of Andrew Davies 236
6.5 Conclusion 244
Notes 246
Bibliography 288
Index 311

List of Illustrations

2.1 John Frederick Lewis, The Reception (1873), oil on panel
© Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection,
USA / Paul Mellon Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library 101
2.2 John Frederick Lewis, The Siesta (1876) © Tate, London 2009 102
3.1 Paperback cover of Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora
Damage (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), reproduced by
permission of Bloomsbury Publishing 109
3.2 Hardback cover of Jane Harris’s The Observations
(London: Faber and Faber, 2006), reproduced by
permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. 112
3.3 (Paperback) jacket cover of Hottentot Venus by Barbara
Chase-Riboud (New York: Random House, 2003),
used by permission of Doubleday, a division of
Random House, Inc. 113
3.4 ‘Les Curieux en extase ou les Cordons de souliers’,
colour print showing Sarah Baartman ‘on show’ in
France. Original engraved by J. Hopner (1814?),
reproduced by permission of Museum Africa,
Johannesburg, South Africa (Museum Africa
Accession No. MA1974–625) 114
3.5 Frederick Christian Lewis, ‘Sartjee the Hottentot
Venus, Exhibition at No 225, Piccadilly’ (1811)
© The British Library Board (C.191.c16) 115
3.6 Venus Anatomica, Felice Fontana Workshop, Florence,
1780s, painted wax figure © The Semmelweis Museum,
Library and Archives of the History of Medicine,
Budapest, Hungary 137
5.1 Paperback cover of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth
Tale (London: Orion, 2006), reproduced by
permission of the Orion Publishing Group 177
5.2 Paperback back cover of Diane Setterfield’s The
Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion, 2006), reproduced by
permission of the Orion Publishing Group 179
ix

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the encouragement
and support of countless individuals. Friends, colleagues, researchers,
and students at the Universities of Hull and Liverpool, and at other
universities, spurred us on with their excitement and eagerness to share
ideas. Many of our thoughts developed in discussion, at conferences,
and with students. We particularly wish to thank the MA students who
took the modules ‘Hystorical Fictions’ (Naomi Crook, Tristessa Moore,
Emma Sanders, Claire Waite), ‘Victorian Afterlives’ (2007–08) and
‘Women’s Writing’ (2008–09), and the Ph.D. students Katy Gledhill,
Theresa Jamieson, Nadine Muller and Allison Neal for their enthusiastic
and energetic commitment to this new field. The exciting new work
in progress, critical and creative, by the next generation of academics
is a potent marker of the contribution neo-Victorianism makes to the
academy as well as to the popular imagination. Further inspiration
came from Diana Wallace, University of Glamorgan; Catherine Wynne
(University of Hull) and her paper on Victorian magic; Mel Kohlke,
editor of Neo-Victorian Studies at Swansea University; Dennis Low; and
many others not named here who sparked off ideas. Sabbatical leave
awarded by the University of Hull, and generous research budget allow-
ances at Hull and Liverpool, helped to bring this book into existence.
Our work was greatly aided by the courtesy and helpfulness of archives,
museums, and publishers, who granted permission to reproduce images:
Bloomsbury; the British Library; Doubleday, a division of Random
House, New York; Faber and Faber Ltd; Fitzwilliam Museum, University
of Cambridge; Museum Africa, Johannesburg; Orion Publishing Group;
the Semmelweis Museum, Library and Archives of the History of
Medicine, Budapest; Tate London; and Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library. Particular thanks are due
to: Jonathan Eyers, Bloomsbury Rights Department; Auste Mickunaite
and Sandra Powlette at the British Library; Alessandro Conficoni at the
Bridgeman Art Library; Nicci Cloke, Permissions Department, Faber and
Faber; Emma Darbyshire and Andrew Norman at the Fitzwilliam Museum;
Linda Chernis at Museum Africa; Paul Stark, Rights Executive, Orion
Publishing Group; Alicia Torello and Carol Christiansen, Permissions
Department, Random House; Benedek Varga and Eszter Blahak at the
Semmelweis Museum; Laura McLardy at the Tate. We are also grateful
x

Acknowledgements xi
for advice by David Prudames and Chris Sutherns at the British Museum,
and Revinder Chahal and Bryony Bartlett-Rawlings at the Victoria and
Albert Museum.
We wish to express our thanks to Lucie Armitt, Rosario Arias, Alexia
Bowler, Katherine Cooper, Jessica Cox, Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Lucy

Gallagher, Regenia Gagnier, Siân Harris, Juliet John, Becky Munford, Rina
Kim, Emma Short, Jane Thomas, Ellen Turner, Ana Hernández Walta,
Clare Westall, Janet Wilson, Paul Young, the Postgraduate Contemporary
Women’s Writing Network, and the Departments of English and History
at Indiana University for enabling us to present aspects of our book
to: the ‘For Love or Money?’ Contemporary Women Writers Network
conference, Bangor University, April 2006; the Senior English Research
Seminar, University of Hull, February 2007; the ‘Neo-Victorianism:
The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation’ conference, University of
Exeter, September 2007; the University of Hull (Inaugural Lecture), April
2008; the ‘Cross-Gendered Voices’ conference, University of Warwick,
May 2008; the ‘Heritage and the Victorians’ conference, University
of Liverpool and St Deiniol’s Library, June 2008; the ‘Adapting the
Nineteenth Century’ conference, University of Lampeter, August 2008;
Indiana University, Bloomington, US, February 2009; the English research
seminar, Northampton University, March 2009; the University of Malaga,
Spain, May 2009; the ‘Echoes of the Past: Women, History and Memory
in Fiction and Film’ conference, University of Newcastle, June 2009; the
‘Writing Bodies’ Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network
conference, September 2009; and the Women’s and Gender Studies
Institute at the University of Granada, Spain, December 2009.
Early versions of sections of chapters were published by Mark Llewellyn
as ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn
2008), pp. 164–85; ‘[Review] The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror by
Simon Joyce’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (2008), pp. 191–5; ‘[Review
Essay] On the Turn’ and ‘[Review Essay] “Posthumous Productivity”:
Political Philosophy, and Neo-Victorian Style’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:1
(2008/09), pp. 153–8 and 179–86; ‘Neo-Victorianism: On the Ethics and
Aesthetics of Appropriation’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, special
issue on Engaging the Victorians, ed. Becky Munford and Paul Young,
20:1–2 (2009), pp. 27–44; ‘Spectrality, S(p)ecularity and Textuality: Or,
Some Reflections in the Glass’, in Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham
(eds), Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 23–42; and by Ann Heilmann as
‘Elective (Historical) Affinities: Contemporary Women Writing the
Victorian’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 3:1 (2009), pp. 103–11, and

xii Acknowledgements
‘Doing It With Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity,

The Prestige, and The Illusionist ’, Neo-Victorian Studies, special issue on
Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and Rewriting the Past,
ed. Jessica Cox and Alexia Bowler, 2:2 (2009/10), pp. 18–42.
Thanks are also due to our reader for invaluable feedback, and our

editors at Palgrave Macmillan: Paula Kennedy, for urging us to write this
book in the first instance, Steven Hall and Benjamin Doyle for ready
and helpful advice, and to our copy editor Christine Ranft.

Introduction
Neo-Victorianism and
Post-Authenticity: On the Ethics

and Aesthetics of Appropriation
The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending

selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy’s
personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped
to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes
to spread through Victorian society, according to an
analysis by evolutionary psychologists [in the New
Scientist]. Their research suggests that classic British
novels from the 19th century not only reflect the
values of Victorian society, they also shaped them.
Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues
of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and
affability against individuals’ hunger for power and
dominance.
Ian Sample, ‘Victorian novels helped us evolve into
better people’, The Guardian, 14 January 20091
What better justifies a collection of new essays on an

old classic than an acknowledgement of interpretative
evanescence? The phrase, ‘the varying experiments of
Time’ . . . suggests why criticism always benefits from
renewal, but it hardly narrows the field. With few
editorial alterations, the text of Middlemarch remains
unchanged: the novel withstands the pressures of
time, circumstance, and personality. However, its
meaning changes both within the culture and within
the consciousness of individual readers. It is for each
generation to chart the differences that ensure that
the novel will not become a relic, but will continue to

2 Neo-Victorianism
exert a pressure on the twenty-first century as vitally as

it did in its nineteenth and our twentieth centuries.
Karen Chase (ed.), Middlemarch in the
Twenty-first Century (2006)2

Writing in The Guardian in May 2008, the novelist Zadie Smith paid
homage to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) under the article title
‘The book of revelations’. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s declaration that
Eliot’s text was ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up
people’,3 Smith outlined the reasons why she disagreed with Henry
James’s reference to bulky nineteenth-century novels as ‘large loose
baggy monsters’.4 Her article posits that James was wrong in judg-
ing Middlemarch as being ‘too much’5 and setting ‘a limit . . . to the
development of the old-fashioned English novel’.6 Middlemarch, Smith
points out, regularly appears in surveys as the most widely read or most
popular English novel, closely followed by Pride and Prejudice and Jane
Eyre. Smith makes two fundamental comments in her article on the way
in which contemporary readers need to reconsider their relationship
with and understanding of the Victorian novel. Firstly, she argues that
‘One of the reasons we idolise the 19th-century English novel is the
ways its methods, aims and expression seem so beautifully integrated.
Author, characters and reader are all striving in the same direction.’7
The Victorian novel is, in Smith’s reading, a book of unity as much as
revelation, an inclusive text which forges universal sympathy towards a
common purpose. In this sense, it appears to support the New Scientist
publication referred to in Ian Sample’s article, with which we started
this chapter: Victorian literature unites its readers, now as then. But as
these statements also indicate, in different ways, there is a danger in
generalizations about what ‘the Victorian novel’ is, and what we think it
should be. When we look more closely at what these cultural commen-
taries and academic narratives of influence, significance, and afterlives
are doing, we perceive the ways in which ‘the Victorian’ has become a
homogenized identity – even a signifier – in contemporary culture. It is
important to question whether Middlemarch, for example, serves as the
exemplar representative of the collective Victorian literary experience, or
as an individual text, by an individual writer, that is somehow separate
from our collective sense of ‘the Victorian’ now. It also connects us to
the idea of the enduring influence of the Victorian on the contemporary
world, particularly, though not exclusively, in the cultural sphere.
As Hugh Kingsmill pointed out in 1932, ‘Had the great Victorians
lived under three or four sovereigns, they would be judged on their

Introduction 3
own merits instead of being regarded as embodiments of an epoch

which owes the illusion of its spiritual unity to the longevity of a
single person.’8 The unification factor, the idea of how to define ‘the
Victorian’ is an essential question to be addressed in a book on neo-
Victorianism in the twenty-first century, which seeks to read the nature

of the Victorian now, and to examine what that enduring influence and
afterlife means for contemporary culture, post-millennium. That there
should be a Bloomian anxiety of influence9 about our relationship to
the nineteenth century is not surprising. Since the Victorians ushered
in (proto-) modernity,10 there is a sense in which our continued return
to them masks nothing less than our own awareness of belatedness.
It is this belatedness, and the strength of our desire for harking back to
the Victorian, which informs this book’s exploration of the function of
the past in contemporary culture and literature, and the various ways in
which the present is negotiated through a range of (re)interpretations of
the nineteenth century. Yet belatedness also implies creative impotence,
rather than impetus; as Zadie Smith puts it, and this is the second
important point of her article:
That 19th-century English novels continue to be written today with

troubling frequency is a tribute to the strength of Eliot’s example and
to the nostalgia we feel for that noble form. Eliot would be proud.
But should we be? For where is our fiction, our 21st-century fiction?
We glimpse it here and there. Certainly not as often as you might
expect, given the times we live in . . . What 21st-century novelists
inherit from Eliot is the freedom to push the English novel’s form to
its limits, wherever they may be.11
The points raised by Smith, a twenty-first-century novelist who does not

herself write in the neo-Victorian mode, draw attention to an ongoing
debate within contemporary literary culture: that the Victorian novelist
and what he or she represents, aims for, and strives towards is still worth
arguing about in, and is indeed relevant to, the twenty-first century,
just as it was essential to the self-constitution of the early twentieth-
century modernists, and was at the centre of academic debates in the
mid and later twentieth century, when Leavisites and Williamsites12 bat-
tled over the terrain of the meaning, politics, aesthetics, and morality
found in Victorian texts, and when in the 1980s a new guard such as
Catherine Belsey challenged the supremacy of the belief in (Victorian)
realism as anything other than an ideological problematic.13 Criticism
and reading, present and past, are aligned here in a complex web of

4 Neo-Victorianism
interrelations and influences. For readers of and writers on Victorian

literature it is refreshing that readers and writers of contemporary litera-
ture still feel these currents of difference, are still interested in the dan-
gerous edginess of nineteenth-century fiction, and are energized by the
new understandings of both the Victorian period and the contemporary

that arise from gazing through this specific historical looking-glass. It is
also a reminder of why we need to think about what texts mean as acts
of reading, as spaces of intellectual exchange, fundamentally concerned
as they are with the ontological and epistemological roots of the now
through an historical awareness of then. Victorian literature, one recog-
nizes in reading Smith’s article, still matters, greatly, and the reading
of Victorian texts, the re-reading and re-writing of them, and the (neo-)
Victorian experience they represent is something that defines our cul-
ture as much as it did theirs. This need not be seen as a negative element
in contemporary culture, either: the belatedness we are focusing on in
this book does not, when creative, playful, metafictional, hold back the
writer. Rather, it makes for a revitalized, even pyrotechnic response to
the ‘tradition’ still so much represented by the Victorians and the pos-
sibilities nineteenth-century fiction always contained within itself for
subversion.
This Introduction sets out some of the key strands that we see as
emerging discourses within the field of ‘neo-Victorianism’. The term has
up until now remained loosely defined, and that may be an advantage
in the wider cultural sphere, but what we explicitly seek to invoke in
our use of the concept is a series of metatextual and metahistorical con-
junctions as they interact within the fields of exchange and adaptation
between the Victorian and the contemporary. What we argue through-
out this book is that the ‘neo-Victorian’ is more than historical fiction set
in the nineteenth century. To be part of the neo-Victorianism we discuss
in this book, texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect
be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and
(re)vision concerning the Victorians. Much of the discussion we formulate
in the subsequent chapters therefore resides within its own hybrid
critical space: drawing on contemporary debates and recent research
within Victorian studies and works on or of contemporary culture,
the chapters each bring forward a question relating to the aesthetic,
ethical, metafictional, and metacritical parameters of their own acts of
(readerly/writerly) appropriation. As Cora Kaplan phrases it in relation
to Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith, ‘I value most that self-consciousness
that insists that I reflect on the complexity of what is at stake at any
given point in my own time about my interest in the Victorian.’14 It is

Introduction 5
this ‘self-consciousness’ about our own subject positions that we, too,
see at the heart of what neo-Victorianism in its more defined, theorized,
conceptualized, and aesthetically developed form offers to readers. This
is what distinguishes contemporary literary and filmic neo-Victorian
culture from other aspects of contemporary culture which embrace his-

torical settings but do not involve themselves to such a high degree in
the self-analytic drive that accompanies ‘neo-Victorianism’.
In light of the Victorian returns it performs, the concept of ‘neo’-
Victorianism offers an interesting angle on the metafictional mode we
consider so essential to the genre. The term ‘neo-Victorian’ has been
adopted in academic studies in favour of the earlier ‘post-Victorian’ (pre-
sumably because of its potential ahistoricity) and ‘retro’/’faux-Victorian’,
which imply an overt nostalgia for the period.15 This popularity is
marked not only in creative but also critical terms with a growth in
studies on the contemporary endurance, even reinvigoration, of our
fascination with the Victorians. That there is a need for a definition of
a term that has a growing number of articles, books, and even a journal
devoted to it16 is made manifest in one recent collection on the theme.
In Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, and Catherine Waters’s Victorian Turns,
NeoVictorian Returns (2008), footnote 5 of the editors’ introduction (by
Judith Johnston and Catherine Waters) problematizes the prefix ‘neo’
as follows:
5. The term ‘Neo,’ when used in conjunction with a political movement,

implies a desire to return to the political beliefs of that movement’s past
(for example, Neo-Fascism) and a desire for the reinstatement of earlier,
and often conservative, values as opposed to more radical change.
Margaret Thatcher’s NeoVictorianism [sic] – her call for a return to
‘Victorian values’ – might be interpreted in this way. However, used in
conjunction with a genre, the implication is rather a new, modified, or
more modern style, as in Neo-Gothic for instance.17
The determination to provide a precise (and positive) definition of neo-

Victorianism in this note is clear and it is no doubt essential when one
is marketing this term as one half of one’s book’s title. But it cannot
really mask the fact that there is a noticeable uneasiness in provid-
ing a working understanding of ‘neo-Victorianism’ in this definition,
which might be compared here to the more confident assertion by
Robin Gilmour in 2000 of six very clear categories of Victorian ‘uses’ in
contemporary fiction.18 As researchers and readers in the fields of both
Victorian literary studies and contemporary fiction, we are concerned

6 Neo-Victorianism
with reclaiming the significance of that prefix ‘neo-’, so that it is more

than a short-hand indication of style, period, or costume in relation to
a specific text or film. What we argue in this book is that just as not
all narratives published between 1837 and 1901 are Victorian, so all
fictions post-1901 that happen to have a Victorian setting or re-write a

Victorian text or a Victorian character do not have to be neo-Victorian;
indeed, we would argue that many of them cannot be identified so
precisely because they fall quite clearly into the category of historical
fiction set in the nineteenth century rather than being texts about
the metahistoric and metacultural ramifications of such historical
engagement. To suggest that all neo-Victorian texts – literary, filmic,
(audio)visual – are progressive (politically, culturally, aesthetically, liter-
arily), and always represent the ‘new, modified, or more modern style’,
just because they appear ‘in conjunction with a genre’, is problematic.
There are plenty of texts that might fit these broader terms of neo-
Victorianism by genre alone but which are also inherently conserva-
tive because they lack imaginative re-engagement with the period, and
instead recycle and deliver a stereotypical and unnuanced reading of
the Victorians and their literature and culture; as Christian Gutleben
notes, there is a danger in the balance between correcting ‘historical
injustice’ and what can be ‘construed cynically as the compliance with
the hegemony of the politically correct’.19 This is a significant issue
because the divide between parody and innovation, pastiche and re-
interpretation is an important demarcation that separates genres on
the border between neo-Victorian texts and historical fiction set in the
nineteenth century.
These are crucial distinctions to make when discussing a genre that
has the potential to descend into cliché or to be seen as pushing against
received assumptions within the larger cultural sphere. Writing on her
blog ‘The Little Professor: Things Victorian and academic’, the US liter-
ary academic Miriam Elizabeth Burstein sums up satirically all the pre-
conceptions we have of the nineteenth century and the erroneous (and
comic) slippages that historical fiction about the Victorians (as opposed
to neo-Victorianism within our definition) can run into:
[T]here are no rules for neo-Victorian novels. Never fear! The L[ittle]
P[rofessor] comes to the rescue!
1. All middle- and upper-class Victorian wives are Sexually Frustrated,
Emotionally Unfulfilled, and possibly Physically Abused. If they’re
lucky, however, they may find Fulfillment with a) a man not
their husband, b) a man not their husband and of the Laboring

Introduction 7
Classes, c) a man not their husband and of Another Race, or d) a

woman not their, er, husband.
2. Christians may be Good, as long as they are not evangelicals. Evan-
gelicals, however, are Bad, and frequently Hypocritical.
3. All heroes and heroines are True Egalitarians who disregard

all differences of Class, Race, and Sex. Heroines, in particular,
are given to behaving in Socially Unacceptable Ways, which is
always Good.
4. All heroes and heroines are Instinctively Admired by members of
Oppressed Populations.
5. Any outwardly respectable man will a) have frequent recourse to
Prostitutes, b) have a Dark Secret, and/or c) be Jack the Ripper.
6. There must be at least one Prostitute, who will be an Alcoholic
and/or have a Heart of Gold. If the novel is about a prostitute,
however, she will have at least one Unusual Talent not related to
her line of work.
7. All children are subject to frequent Physical, Emotional, and
Sexual Abuse. Nevertheless, they will grow up to become Sensitive
and Caring Adults.
8. Any novel based on an actual Victorian literary work must include
considerable quantities of Sex.
9. There must be at least one scene set in a Wretched Slum, which
will be very Dirty and Damp.
10. The novelist must make the prose more Antique by eliminating
all Contractions and using Period Slang (whether or not it is
actually appropriate).
11. Finally, the novel’s publicist should use the adjective ‘Dickensian’
at least once.20
The Little Professor’s list is naturally meant to be ironic and necessar-

ily blurs the distinctive intellectual elements to be found in the more
complex paradigms of neo-Victorian fiction which seeks to advance an
alternative view of the nineteenth century for a modern audience. Yet
it does hold some truths and is an apt summary of much of the mate-
rial published in the sub-genre of historical fiction set in the nineteenth
century. While the list offers stereotypes in its portrayal of the kinds of
character and plot lines used in neo-Victorian fictions, this is echoed in
the fact that, as Gutleben has pointed out in Nostalgic Postmodernism, so
much of contemporary historical fiction about the Victorian period is
‘conservative’21 in its aesthetics when arguing against long-established
clichés about the ideas and fixations of the Victorians themselves. This

8 Neo-Victorianism
kind of fiction often appears to be driven by a desire to illuminate

and occasionally even ‘correct’ aspects of the Victorian age, or the
Victorians’ attitudes to the specifics of sex, gender, and erotic rela-
tionships.22 The popularity of such fictional re-encounters with the
Victorian is undoubted; one has only to think of the recent success of

the novels of Sarah Waters and the subsequent TV adaptations to see the
economic and cultural ‘bestseller’ status of such works. What this intro-
ductory chapter seeks to do is raise some issues concerning the ethical
and aesthetic dimensions of such creative and cultural re-engagements
with the Victorian, before leading on to an outline of the discussions
presented in the subsequent chapters. Ultimately, this book is an analy-
sis of a range of cultural encounters with the Victorian from 1999 to
the present. Its core question is: why does contemporary literature and
culture repeatedly initiate returns to the nineteenth century?
1 History, literature, and criticism
While the last twenty years have seen a growth in the literary and
cultural phenomenon now termed neo-Victorianism, it is necessary to
remember that the birth of the genre in its broadest definition was itself
almost simultaneous with the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1901.
Indeed, chronologically speaking everything after that key date is in
an essential manner post-Victorian (though not neo-Victorian), even
if it was only really with the work of authors like Jean Rhys in Wide
Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969) that a conscious articulation of the desire to re-write, re-vision
and challenge the nineteenth-century’s assumptions and dominance
came about.23 Books such as A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize winning dual-
time narrative Possession: A Romance (1990) and more recently still the
popularity of Waters’s work in both print and via adaptations for TV
have illustrated a continued fascination with, if not fixation on, the
Victorians and their relationship to us. One might even suggest that
this obsessive return to the past is part of a Derridean reaffirmation of
our shared cultural heritage.24 But these works, while they pay a kind
of homage to the period even as they seek to provide new angles on its
events, repressed desires, and more unusual lives or experiences, very
rarely present a critique of our own enduring attraction to the material-
ist and expansionist cultural hegemony of nineteenth-century Britain
in the popular imagination and public memory.25 Even those texts
which do seek to assert a more critique-driven perspective on the colo-
nial, repressive, and suppressive mindset of the age of empire often fail

Introduction 9
to address or negate the impulse to interrogate our ongoing obsession

with that prolonged and continuous historical moment which ‘began’
(for want of a better term) in 1837 (for want of a better starting point),
and ended alongside the chronological cessation of Victoria’s own life
on 22 January 1901.26

This simultaneous attraction to and abjection from the Victorian,
however, does merit further investigation, particularly in the contexts
of those texts which seek to analyse our sustained need to reinterpret
the Victorians and what they mean to us. There have been a number of
recent studies which have looked at aspects of the neo-Victorian from
specific perspectives. Diana Wallace’s The Woman’s Historical Novel:
British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (2004)27 takes the historical fiction
genre more generally as a context for thinking about issues surround-
ing women’s authorship during the twentieth century, and rewrit-
ings of the Victorian are discussed alongside Regency romances and
other historical time periods. Building on Wallace’s work but taking a
more precise focus, Jeannette King’s The Victorian Woman Question in
Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005)28 again takes the issue of women’s
writing and Victorian debates about women’s rights and reads these
through the revisioning lens of contemporary feminist authors. Joined
most recently by Tatiana Kontou’s Spiritualism and Women’s Writing:
From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (2009),29 these three texts
might be read as a collective statement on the importance of women
writers to neo-Victorianism and the significance of neo-Victorian ideas
and approaches to contemporary women’s writing. Taking a broader
approach to the neo-Victorian, Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the
Rearview Mirror (2007)30 covers a range of twentieth-century adaptations
and appropriations of the Victorians from the Bloomsbury Group’s
rebellion against their parents’ generation through to recent films
which provide a sense of the Victorian ‘view’ on realism and interpreta-
tion, while Christine Krueger’s collection Functions of Victorian Culture
at the Present Time (2002) usefully focuses on the functionality of our
encounters with the Victorian in film and literature but also through
the reporting of crime, architecture, and home furnishings.31 Similarly
broad in her approach is Cora Kaplan in Victoriana: Histories, Fictions,
Criticism (2007),32 which provides a set of case studies, including Jane
Eyre, biographies and fictions about Henry James, and a postcolonial
reading of Jane Campion’s The Piano as a means of approaching the
Victorians as they continue to influence the contemporary. While these
texts and others mentioned elsewhere in this introduction and through-
out this book provide a sense of the diversity and flexibility of the

10 Neo-Victorianism
neo-Victorian as a creative form and a place for critical interpretation,

it is noticeable that there remains a tension about the definition of this
field, and that there is continuing evidence of the rather selective and
self-perpetuating notion of a neo-Victorian canon.33 This is a danger
inherent in the nature of adaptation and appropriation, but here it is

not just that the same Victorian texts appear to be reworked, rewrit-
ten, and revisioned by contemporary writers but also that critical work
generates a sense of the neo-Victorian as identifiable within a small set
of writers and texts. What we argue in this book is that the definition
of the neo-Victorian requires greater conceptual clarification, and that
in strengthening such an interpretative terminology we should also be
alert to and open about the growing number of texts that can be associ-
ated within such a definition’s parameters.
Given the current and increasing popularity, both cultural and aca-
demic, of the field, this appears to be an appropriate moment to reflect
more on the subject of neo-Victorianism as an intellectual and cultural
mode, and explore some of the ways in which we might come to think
about the historio-aesthetic strengths of the neo-Victorian at the same
time as raising some questions about the ethical aspects of the genre.
By aesthetics here we are referring primarily to the decisions made
by both writer and reader to use contemporary fiction as a means of
(re)encountering the nineteenth century, while ethics is used in the
sense of the intellectual and cultural meanings and impact contained
within or consequential to that aesthetic choice; what David Andress
terms ‘an ethical approach to history [which] involves the viewing of
people in the past as “ethical subjects” – entitled to the same consid-
eration for their actions and perspectives as we would hope to receive
for our own.’34 This ethical inflection to our approach towards fiction
in general has been characterized by Kenneth Womack as a means of
explaining ‘the contradictory emotions and problematic moral stances’
involved in the ‘character of contemporary hermeneutics’.35 More
importantly, it coincides with a historiographic return to the ethical in
history writing: as Peter Mandler recently put it,
The imaginative capability of history is closely connected to its

ethical capability. One of the purposes of historical time travel is to
transport our modern selves into alien situations which allow us to
highlight by contrast our own values and assumptions. Sometimes it
is easier to examine complex ethical questions honestly and openly
in an historical rather than in a contemporary setting, the distanc-
ing involved in taking out some of the heat of the moment without

Introduction 11
disengaging entirely contemporary values and attitudes. In this

aspect history asks us not to lose ourselves in the past but to view the
past from our own standpoint; in fact, one of its functions is to help
us define our standpoint more clearly.36

Mandler, like several historians, also notes contemporary culture’s pro-
pensity to return to the past, to engage in this ‘historical time travel’,
as part of a mainstream movement back to the pre-modernist period.
Another historian, Jonathan Clark, claims that ‘[p]ostmodernism is the
most theoretically expressed version of a rejection of the historical.
This rejection is a consequence of the way in which postmodernism
has set itself against what it takes to be “modernist” ideas of truth and
objectivity, replacing what it sees as a set of grand narratives claiming
objective authority with a diverse pattern of localized narratives and
fluid identities.’37 What Clark’s discussion does not recognize is that this
contemporary fragmentation of narrative structure at the level of the
historical narrative has been mirrored in contemporary fiction’s attempt
to return to the ostensible security of coherent narrative structures and
textual order as represented by the nineteenth century. It is the coincid-
ing nature of these historiographic trends with fictional developments,
as ethics and aesthetics intersect, that we want to explore here.
Peter Widdowson argued in an article of 2006 that it has become a
‘truism’ that British contemporary fiction is dominated by historical
novels, even suggesting that there is now a specific genre called
‘re-visionary fiction’ in which works re-write or ‘write back to’ ‘canonic
texts from the past’. Widdowson ‘speculate[s]’ on reasons for ‘this mod-
ern penchant for historical fictions’ and comments that at ‘the more
cynical end of the spectrum . . . popular pastiches serve to satisfy peo-
ple’s persistent craving for “a good read” on the old grand scale’. One
reason for this return, he suggests, might be ‘the enormity of present
reality’ and ‘novelists[’] despair of finding adequate forms of represen-
tation for it’, or that ‘the past’s presence in the present determines the
nature of that present’ (another truism), or even that it’s ‘just one more
aspect of postmodernism’.38 In the context of these other options, it is
not so easy to take the first version, that of the ‘good read’, so straight-
forwardly as one of the factors that appeal to readers in the market for
neo-Victorian fiction. To take one prominent recent example: Michel
Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) is the story of Sugar, that
prostitute with the ‘Heart of Gold’ (her mother takes the ‘Alcoholic’
option) cited by the Little Professor. Despite the fact that the plotline
and indeed the character of Sugar are unbelievable – perhaps that is the

12 Neo-Victorianism
point – the novel is of interest here because of the way in which it seeks
to undermine readers’ confidence in the aesthetic purpose of the neo-
Victorian novel as a form. It does this by having no real conclusion, and
with the story gradually fading out at perhaps one of the more exciting
moments of the entire text, as Sugar, having already managed to save

the girl’s mother from imprisonment in an asylum, kidnaps the girl to
whom she has acted as governess, from the father who was once Sugar’s
exclusive customer. The idea that a novel with that kind of summary
of the final pages could ever reach a satisfying conclusion is beside the
point. More intriguing and interesting than what happens to the char-
acters in the novel is what happened to the novel’s readers on reaching
this conclusion.
It is precisely the lack of an ‘ending’ about which readers complained.
In his collection The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories (2006), a text in
part written to supply, though not to satisfy, the concluding material
expected by readers of his novel, Faber points out in his ‘Foreword’ that
readers wrote to him to demand satisfaction; one ranted: ‘How dare
your book end with us not knowing what happened to Agnes! And
where did Sugar take Sophie off to anyhow? Novels aren’t supposed
to just stop! Novels aren’t like real life. Novels are supposed to have
satisfying tight endings.’39 Faber’s response to this is a neat conflation
of readers’ faith in the reality of his characters and an odd justification
that he was trying to emulate something about the Victorian mode of
publication itself:
Sugar has been denied privacy all her life, I would say, and by the end
of the novel she has earned the right to make her own way in the
world, unscrutinised by us. And isn’t it fun, at the end of a book, to
be challenged to do what the Victorians were obliged to do between
instalments of serialised novels: construct what happens next in our
imaginations? (xvi)
Faber’s argument is, of course, flawed in suggesting that the ending of a

neo-Victorian novel is trying to emulate the relationship that developed
between reader and text during the serialization of a publication in the
Victorian period: for George Eliot every limit might well have been both
a beginning and an ending, but for her readers the final chapter of a
novel was, as far as we are concerned here, just that: final. And yet the
Victorian novel itself is full of examples of endings postponed and read-
ers left wondering: would Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) be the same
novel without that concluding yet inconclusive ‘Farewell’ from Lucy

Introduction 13
Snowe? The point raises important questions about how contemporary

neo-Victorian readers think the Victorian realist mode worked. Faber’s
text disappoints them because it does not live up to their expectations of
a (neo-)Victorian novel; they feel intellectually and financially conned
because they have bought into a version of the Victorian that the author

seems to play along with only to renegotiate the terms of the contract
in the final pages. Where Faber’s comment is most interesting, then, is
in its implicit association of contemporary readers with the customers
for Sugar’s sexual favours in the novel. In this statement, Faber makes
a direct link between Sugar’s ‘earning’ of her keep through physical
prostitution and a writer’s earning of his/her keep through providing a
kind of textual relief through the neo-Victorian story. Readers are, Faber
seems to suggest, addicted, in spite of Bloomsbury’s modernism and the
postmodernist approaches to be found in much contemporary fiction,
to the standard formula of beginning, middle and end, with that final
word being and providing an appropriate sense of conclusion.40 Neo-
Victorian fiction does, of course, often fall into the trap of providing
us with that tying up of everything in a neat little package, and read-
ers drawn to Faber’s novel no doubt thought that for their investment
(both financial and time-wise) in his 800+ page text they would get
neatness, finality, and the concluding moment, so unlike to what we
find in life. Faber’s version of the neo-Victorian, though, seems to be
driven by the desire to provide a version of escapism defeated. As such,
it offers a different kind of aesthetic and ethical choice on the part of
both author and reader; Faber’s ethical stance is an odd mixture caught
between the aesthetics and the associated pleasures of telling a good
story and the moral implication of keeping a distance from the ‘reality’
of the characters within it. In that sense, Faber plays on the historian’s
dilemma and that of the Victorian novelist too. It is no accident, as
Peter Mandler notes, that while nineteenth-century French historians
like Jules Michelet and Jacques-Nicolas-Augustin Thierry were develop-
ing a national historical narrative, ‘the English were not behindhand in
devising a popular, romantic history, although, because it came first out
of the cultural marketplace rather than the State or the academy, it took
the form not of the textbook but of the novel. Thierry’s acknowledged
master, upon whose style and method he closely modelled his own,
was [Walter Scott,] the author of those great fictional epics of English
history, Ivanhoe (1819) and Kenilworth (1821).’41 Narrative, historical or
fictional, is united in its desire to tell the story, and history is a story
always, as Richard Evans notes, ‘written, consciously or unconsciously,
from the perspective of the present’.42 But when fiction looks backward,

14 Neo-Victorianism
it does so in a necessarily different and more playful manner than the

factual.
The clues to Faber’s narrative game with historical hindsight and fic-
tional rootedness are there from the outset as he plays with the reader’s
understanding of perspective, chronology, and the idea of what the

neo-Victorian novel is about. The opening lines capture this stance
perfectly:
Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This
city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been
here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that
you know it well, but these stories flattered you, welcoming you as a
friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an
alien from another time and place altogether.43
Readers who fail to pay heed to this warning about the ‘truth’ within
the text simultaneously ignore the fact that this is a hint from the very
beginning that what we are not going to get is a classic imitation of the
reader’s own ideas about Victorian realism. We are emphasizing the ref-
erence to the reader’s ideas here precisely because the aesthetic decision
to read and engage with a neo-Victorian novel often seems prompted
by a desire to have Victorian length, plot, and character but without
the ‘difficulties’ of Victorian language and circumlocution concerning
issues of the body and sexuality; in other words, the desire is often for
a contemporary novel which begins with the phrase ‘Part One: 1861’ or
some other signifier of a supposed textual and temporal shift from the
present day of the reader to the fiction of the Victorian, which is actu-
ally little more than a fabrication to mask a novel that is an extension
of the contemporary rather than historical realism.
Faber’s play with time continues a few pages later when the narrative
voice deflates our expectations that anyone in this novel is going to
conform to rule 5c in the Little Professor’s list: ‘Of Jack the Ripper she
need have no fear; it’s almost fourteen years too early’ (7). In The Apple
these games continue: in the opening story, ‘Christmas in Silver Street’,
for example, we read: ‘Do not be scandalised by Sugar’s age. The age of
consent for girls is twelve. In two years from now [1874], it will be raised
to thirteen.’ (4) These celebrations of the text’s own artificiality to be
found in its knowing asides to the reader blur the moment of the narra-
tive with the historical foreknowledge that cannot really (or should not)
be negated by the belated contemporary. These readerly addresses are
open to the interpretation that one of Faber’s concerns is to highlight and

Introduction 15
pinpoint the very inauthentic nature of his text, to play with the concept
of omniscient authorial knowingness in order on the face of it to collude
with readers even as he conspires against their desire for an ‘unreal’ ending.
Games-playing of this kind also, however, poses fundamental intellectual
questions about the ethical standpoint of the author and reader in relation

to the notion of temporality and the ‘knowable’ nature of an historical
period. Such acts draw our attention to the (meta)fictionality of the nar-
rative and create that playful sense of shared alertness about the nature
of the fiction. It is such encounters at the metafictional and metacritical
levels that we focus upon in the following chapters.
Just as Susan Barrett’s 2005 novel Fixing Shadows is about the pinning
down of the historical moment in a photographic record, so it has to
be recognized that for all the possibilities of imaginative reinvention
to which the Victorians can be subjected there is nevertheless such a
thing as a Victorian experience that cannot always be recast into a neo-
Victorian story of difference; this is precisely where the issue of the
prefix of the genre’s title raises both expectations and questions about
the construction of a ‘neo-Victorian’ perspective. In what sense can a
text which postdates the period concerned by over a century claim a
direct inheritance from within that literary lineage? This might be mis-
read as taking the generic signifier as too specific, but whereas ‘historical
fiction’ encompasses within its title a notion of the fictional imagina-
tion, neo-Victorianism is potentially able to be interpreted as offering a
different sense of the historical imaginary, and one which can be seen
not only as imitating or mimicking an earlier style or mode, but also as
seeking to inherit its position and in some senses displace its precursor.
The issue of narrative endings, then, becomes a focus of neo-Victorian
novelists’ attention, possibly because of the sense in which their work
seeks to prevent a notion of periodicity and textual closure. Fixing
Shadows, indeed, provides an articulation of the very problem of conclu-
sion for which Faber only partially desires to provide an answer:
So now we have arrived at the final chapter and must, therefore, con-
trive a proper conclusion for our story. And it is surely required that
we aim high at this point, rounding all (the deserving, at least) with
happy endings, as secrets are revealed, the lost found and the parted
reunited. And if such loose-end-tying should be considered banal,
then at the very least we should stoop to a more general moral: a
satisfactory ending should leave the reader with a sensation of either
well-being, all’s right with the world, or hope, all’s potentially right
with the world.44

16 Neo-Victorianism
One need only think of the ending of Middlemarch for an example

of this, or, indeed, David Lodge’s comment in his reworking of the
Victorian industrial novel, Nice Work (1988), that ‘all the Victorian nov-
elist could offer . . . were: a legacy, a marriage, emigration or death.’45
In many cases, it seems that the neo-Victorian novelist cannot offer

any other alternatives and thus the neo-Victorian marks a return to the
classic form of the nineteenth-century novel in a way that, structur-
ally at least, seems often to negate the experiments of the modernist
movement. Like Woolf’s Lily Briscoe, contemporary novelists have their
vision, but they must follow the lead of George Eliot in drawing it all
together in the end. Such an interpretation also has wider significance
for our understanding of the nature of postmodernist experimentation
itself as that desire for a ‘good read’ supersedes narrative innovation,
fragmentation, and the invention of new forms in order to return to the
potential certainties, satisfactions, and comforts of a more traditional
mode of representation.
The tying up of not-so-loose ends and the sense of finality to the
text’s conclusion also bear comparison with the genre in which much
neo-Victorianism locates itself and to which it is particularly suited: detec-
tion. Most historical fiction can function quite easily in this genre, but
it works especially well in the Victorian case partly because it was dur-
ing that period that detective stories really emerged. The association
between detection and historical fiction per se inevitably rests in the
similarities in the gathering of evidence and the search for the new (and
hopefully correct) interpretation of that material. It also allows the nar-
rative to stray into the deeper and darker recesses of Victorian society;
as Julie Sanders indicates, ‘[t]he Victorian era and its active underworld
would seem to offer a very specific example of these kinds of social
and cultural contradictions and this may in part explain the ongoing
fascination with appropriating the modes of nineteenth-century fic-
tion more generally in contemporary writing.’46 Sanders makes specific
reference to the popularity of the 1860s, and it is to one contemporary
novel set in that decade that we now wish to turn briefly to illustrate
how some of the best neo-Victorian work seeks simultaneously to tell a
‘good story’ and throw into question in productive ways the very nature
of the neo-Victorian enterprise on aesthetic and ethical grounds.
Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006) by D.J. Taylor is a book that seeks to
explore far more within its neo-Victorian mystery framework than the
contortions a sensation novel plot seem to provide. Indeed, Taylor’s
title subtly addresses the nature of neo-Victorian fiction and its rela-
tionship to the Victorian precursor text. So many neo-Victorian fictions

Introduction 17
are rewritings of the Victorian that the issue of what is ‘kept’ or what
remains of the specifically ‘Victorian mystery’ becomes of fundamental
importance. As a term, ‘kept’ also implies something about part of the
self-conscious awareness of the text’s belatedness, its re-reading and
challenge to the earlier literary inheritance. Taylor signals this through

the recycling of the names and plotlines of Victorian novels in his
text – sometimes in the most unlikely ways. But part of his meaning
in such literary-historical homage must surely lie in the metafictional
idea that all neo-Victorian fiction is in some sense appropriating the
aesthetic framework and even the literal characteristics of the original
texts. Sanders points out that the various forms of appropriation and
adaptation contain an element of ‘commentary on a sourcetext. This
is achieved most often by offering a revised point of view from the
“original”, adding hypothetical motivation, or voicing the silenced and
marginalized. Yet adaptation can also constitute a simpler attempt to
make texts “relevant” or easily comprehensible to new audiences and
readerships via the processes of proximation and updating.’47 In the
case of neither Faber nor Taylor are things as clear-cut as this statement
might suggest, unless we take their making the Victorian (or Victorian
texts) ‘easily comprehensible’ as part of an ironic comment on the
notion of appropriation as an aesthetic mode. Taylor’s use of Victoriana
in his novel is excessive to the extreme and almost promotes the text
as literally devouring the literature from which it is born and on which
it feeds. This consuming approach to the Victorian intertext posits the
way in which the narrative ethics of the neo-Victorian are complicated
via the ‘theft’ (read appropriation) of the structural fabric and textual
characteristics from the ‘original’ nineteenth-century novel.
Just as Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White defeats our longing for
the closure that is culturally perceived as characteristic of the Victorian
(and especially the neo-Victorian) realist novel, so Taylor appears to
pre-empt the desires of two distinct types of readership: the reader of
contemporary fiction (who may have little sense of the adaptation of
character identities from Victorian texts) and the reader (often profes-
sionalized, one imagines, as a Victorianist or literary academic) who
will acknowledge these points of reference and may, at some moments
in the narrative, be led astray (or prevented from being led astray) by
assumptions associated with the signifiers of the nomenclature Taylor
employs. There are thus two levels of reading, identified by the respec-
tive awareness they prompt of the use being made of the Victorian
text; for each reading experience, there is a distinct and differing
knowledge of the act of appropriation. We recognize that an assertion

18 Neo-Victorianism
about divided readerships, between the ‘ordinary’ reader and the more
‘knowledgeable’ critical reader, is potentially controversial. This dif-
ferentiation into diverse reading experiences and the emphasis on the
‘knowing’ reader, however, is prompted by the games-playing of the
novels themselves, and underlies the argument of the chapters which

follow. It is a position we see as essential to the identification of the
metafictionality at the core of the neo-Victorian modus operandi.
Cora Kaplan has recently posited the idea that ‘[h]owever much the
Victorian world, refracted through its imaginative writing, acts as a foil
for arguments about culture and politics today, it is the rediscovered
joys of Victorian literature that draws modern novelists back to the
nineteenth century’.48 This ties in well with a statement by Byatt, whose
Possession might be seen as the beginning of the late-twentieth-century
vogue for the neo-Victorian, that ‘[i]t may be argued that we cannot
understand the present if we do not understand the past that preceded
and produced it . . . But there are other, less solid reasons, amongst them
the aesthetic need to write coloured and metaphorical language, to keep
past literatures alive and singing, connecting the pleasure of writing to
the pleasure of reading.’49 Taylor’s novel problematizes this entire rela-
tionship by promoting the possibility that there is an aesthetic question
to be asked about what lies beneath our almost parasitic fascination
with the continued return to the Victorian narrative – historical and
literary – even as that period’s story grows increasingly distant from
our own. As a biographer of Thackeray among others, Taylor draws our
attention to the potential pitfalls in providing contemporary readers
with what they want from a neo-Victorian novel; his nostalgic version
of the postmodern, to adapt Gutleben’s terminology,50 can be read as
exploring the ways in which different readers respond to and seek dif-
ferent things from a contemporary Victorian text.
Kept has two epigrams which play with the Victorian/modernist, and
by implication postmodernist, nexus: the first, from M.R. James, reads:
‘Please to remember that I am a Victorian, and that the Victorian tree
cannot but be expected to bear Victorian fruit’,51 while the second is
from Marcel Proust and is more enigmatic: ‘Beneath the signs there lay
something of a different kind.’52 Combined, these two statements high-
light the intermediary nature of the narrative that is about to unfold.
Presented as a kind of mid-Victorian detective story (the events take
place between 1863 and 1866 and are therefore set in the heart of the
decade of sensation fiction), the narrative ensures that we must pick
up numerous clues beyond those of the plot itself. Thus, just as char-
acters’ names seem to demand to be over-read, so place names inflect

Introduction 19
an all-too-knowing narrator/author: Tite Street features prominently

(although in reality it would be three decades later when the resident of
number 34, one Oscar Wilde, would make the address more prominent
still), and a passage with Dickensian overtones ends with a character
‘skipping girlishly away in the direction of Somers Town’,53 no doubt

partly a play on the surname of the heroine of Bleak House, given that
an Esther figure is a key character in Kept; Waters does the same with the
connotations attached to the use of Cheyne Walk in Affinity and it has
become something of a stock trick in neo-Victorian texts. The identifi-
cation and assertion of locations out of time (that is, allusions to places
where the historical and literary significance comes after the date of the
scene described) is again something which reflects on a sense of belated-
ness (characters and plots are caught out by a framework of interpreta-
tion that will happen later) and dislocation found in the neo-Victorian
textual play. (We discuss this theme of locations out of time in more
detail in Chapter 1 in relation to the notion of the ancestral home.)
Like Faber, Taylor appears determined to break the illusion of the
‘Victorian’ nature of this mystery at key moments, among them the
passage dividing parts four and five which is an extract from a country
house guidebook that alludes to the history of Easton Hall, East Anglia,
right up to 1942. The breaking of the neo-Victorian illusion is, of course,
also an assertion of that illusion, for the guidebook entry itself is a fabri-
cation. This illustrates precisely the way in which a negotiation is being
set up between the periods, the fact that the author ostensibly allows
an ethical dimension to enter into the narration that reasserts the fic-
tional nature of the historical narrative and which inevitably insinuates
a need for readers to recognize that the aesthetics of appropriation are
derivative and fabricated. This conceit, which involves, for example,
for a heroine from Margaret Oliphant’s fiction, Miss Marjoribanks, to
be written to ‘C/o Mrs Browning, 18 Wimpole Street’, underlines that
what is ‘kept’ in this narrative is the pretence of both Victorian fic-
tion and a neo-Victorian reality founded on historical evidence. It also
provides a neat reflection on the overlap between fact and fiction in so
many neo-Victorian novels – the introduction, for example, of real-life
personalities from the period, usually and especially Victorian writers.
Here, fictional and factual individuals are blurred to the extent that the
text cannot help but highlight the ways in which the derivative nature
of neo-Victorianism consumes the figures it seeks to emulate. This
naturally brings forward certain aesthetic and ethical questions about
the appropriation of ‘real’ Victorian lives into creative texts, and the
nature of authenticity in this process. Using historical figures as if they

20 Neo-Victorianism
were merely characters in a fiction, or rather the potential for treating

the historical past as if it were a fictional narrative does undermine
certain aspects of history as a lived experience. Appropriating the dead
writers of the nineteenth century in ways that imply they are only fig-
ments of a shared cultural imagination opens up new possibilities but

also additional dimensions and tensions in relation to the authentic
as presented in the neo-Victorian text. Like the biographer as a grave-
robber, some neo-Victorian fictions deliberately confound the distinc-
tion between reality and imagination, lives lived and lives created.
One might cite here the flourishing of Henry James novels at the turn
of the millennium, or as Kaplan puts it, ‘this fin de siècle flowering of
Jamesiana’.54 In the case of James, of course, this is particularly ironic,
given that one of his most well-known short stories, ‘The Aspern Papers’
(1888), is about precisely this kind of literary grave-robbing.
The invocation of factual personalities in fiction has long posed prob-
lems for both writers and critics. As the American writer Jonathan Dee
states: ‘The appropriation of genuine historical figures – people who
actually lived – as characters in fiction is an act of imaginative boldness
that, through simple attrition, readers of contemporary fiction have
come to take entirely for granted.’55 If this is the case, then historical
fiction in many senses ceases to serve one of its primary functions in
re-imagining the past, by obscuring or fabricating evidence rather than
providing accountable biographical narratives; a more detailed discus-
sion on a related theme follows in Chapter 3’s elaboration of the series
of fictional and non-fictional accounts in recent years of the life, death,
and posthumous narrative of Saartjie Baartman. Taylor’s use of liter-
ary figures as side-characters in his novel presents just such a complex
encounter between historical fact and historical fiction. The issue for
Taylor’s text, however, is not his invention of new fictional identities
to interact with these real-life figures, but rather the way in which all
Victorian identities become part of an intricate web of fiction, and the
blurring of the line between the statements that there was a poet called
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and there is a fictional character called Miss
Majoribanks.
In an article entitled ‘Flexing the Imagination’, James Harold explores
this core issue of the accurate or authentic within an ethical context of
historical imagining. As Harold notes, ‘the difference between morally
praiseworthy and morally blameworthy attempts at fictive imagining
has to do not only with the fidelity of the imagining, but with the
motives of the imaginer.’56 The tension here is something that Harold
perceives as integral to the form of historical fiction precisely because

Introduction 21
the imaginative action involved on the part of both writer and reader
draws them into an assessment of the text on the basis of how it matches
an ‘accurate’ notion of the period, character, or situation: ‘Questions of
accuracy and ethics are conjoined whenever the character depicted in a
narrative represents . . . an actual (living or historical) person . . . in a way

that purports to be accurate. And most historical fiction . . . does aspire
to accuracy’.57 It might be argued that this ethical debate is more central
when the time period being explored is historically closer to the readers’
lived experience. Just as Lytton Strachey noted that ‘[t]he history of
the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it’,58
so one might posit the idea that the attempt towards accuracy and its
contingent authenticity is also in a problematic alignment in the case of
contemporary encounters with the Victorian period. Although he does
not dwell in detail on the issue of the blurring between fictional and fac-
tual characters, the following comment from Harold does bear relevance
for the case of James Wilson’s The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense (2001),
a text of interest here because of its treatment of the real-versus-fictional
‘character’ dynamic. Harold writes:
An inaccurately imagined character is not just an aesthetic failure . . .

it may also be a moral failure, when the imagined character repre-
sents either an actual person or a token of some actual type such that
there is some obligation to the actual person or group being fiction-
ally imagined that the imagination be true to life.59
Wilson’s novel confounds the distinctions between real and fictional

individuals and in so doing takes biographical speculation about the
lives of individuals from the Victorian period and moves beyond it. Julie
Sanders sums up the text accurately as containing a ‘sexually aggressive
element . . . [which] is part of the novel’s wider investment in exploring
the sexual undercurrents and repressions of the Victorian era’.60 The
fact that the ‘sexually aggressive element’ is portrayed in relation to
a character adopted from a Victorian narrative (Walter Hartright from
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, 1860), who commits a sexual
attack on a character from the same story (Marion Halcombe), is but
an example of how contemporary writers use nineteenth-century texts
as an imaginative repository. What is more ethically questionable is the
fact that Wilson’s novel speculates on this sexual attack as a result of
the influence of J.W.M. Turner, the subject of the biography Hartright
has been commissioned to write. The gradual descent into madness of
the central protagonist of the novel is thus drawn into an analogous

22 Neo-Victorianism
relationship with the ‘insanity’ of the real-life Turner. This does raise
ethical questions, and also aesthetic issues concerning the relation-
ship between text and reality, and the appropriation of an historical
identity for the purpose of blurring the boundaries between fiction and
fact, literature and life. While Wilson begins his ‘Note on Sources’ with

the standard disclaimer that ‘[t]his is, of course, a novel not a work of
non-fiction’,61 what is suggested in his book goes beyond the issue of
the factual site of literature and the fictional site of history, and instead
posits the idea that all lives are textually fair game. Patently, this is
not the case. But it appears as if one aspect of the neo-Victorian is
about underlining the historical relativity and quasi-fictiveness of the
Victorians to our own period, even as it simultaneously exploits the
possibilities that chronological distance provides; in authorially claim-
ing authenticity such textual games at the same time throw into relief
their own ethical ambiguity. As Wayne C. Booth indicates, plays with
the past are a dilemma for those dealing with both the fictional and
the factual: ‘[h]istorical novelists always deliberately or unconsciously
violate known facts about the past, to make the fiction go, and narrative
historians (too often?) do the same, to make the history go.’62 This is
partly what Booth terms ‘an author’s invitation to duplicity’63 and it is
this kind of ‘invitation’ that authors of neo-Victorian texts often seem
to proffer to different readerships and for different reasons.
This also raises a question about what we do as readers and research-
ers in this field: Hartright in Wilson’s novel is very much portrayed as
the scholarly biographer-detective, seeking out evidence, hunting down
the ‘dark clue’ of the novel’s title, and generally performing a research-
active role. Such textual layering proves a key dynamic of Taylor’s
narrative, too, and acts as an invitation to readers to follow the lead
of the narrative and become textual detectives in their own right. The
objective of such detection, as we have seen above in relation to Taylor’s
novel, is often literary critical, involving the tracing of the canonical
threads within the narrative. As Sanders has pointed out, ‘[a]daptation
both appears to require and to perpetuate the existence of a canon,
although it may in turn contribute to its ongoing reformulation and
expansion.’64 Much neo-Victorian fiction attempts to undertake this
‘reformulation and expansion’ and does it well, but nevertheless there
remain two main types of appropriation of relevance here that Sanders
categorizes as embedded texts and ‘sustained appropriation’.65 In the
case of the latter, Sanders asks, is it ‘homage or plagiarism?’,66 and the
question is an important one on both aesthetic and ethical levels. Just
as it has been noted of Byatt’s spoof Victorian poetry/poets in Possession

Introduction 23
that ‘[t]hese “recreational” fictions are never pure ventriloquism . . .

They rely on their readers’ awareness that they are reading from the
vantage point of the modern era’,67 so it appears that the higher end
of neo-Victorianism seeks to illuminate its own trickeries in the pro-
cess of seeking to articulate a ‘Victorian’ voice, or character, or plot, or

standpoint. It might be argued that this sets up an artificial ‘high’ and
‘low’ cultural divide between literary fiction and its popular culture
equivalent; and the divide is clearly there. It would be false to suggest
that texts which merely rewrite Victorian novels in contemporary ways
are doing anything other than a straightforward pastiche: meeting a
market demand but not necessarily adding anything new to our under-
standing of how fiction works, what that fiction can do, or possibly
what it cannot do. In the case of Kept and The Crimson Petal and the
White it is arguable that what Taylor and Faber are doing is deliberately
to undermine the faith that a neo-Victorian novel can meet the great
expectations of a contemporary reader eager to have a completely new
take on those sexually repressed Victorians. Instead, both texts suggest
the parasitic limitations of that approach and also the impossibility of
the reading punters (to adopt a deliberately double-edged term) achiev-
ing satisfaction.
Adding a slightly different take on the issue, Michael Cox’s The Meaning
of Night: A Confession (2006) relates to the general theme here because of
its ‘Editor’s Preface’ and its extensive and elaborate paratextual apparatus
of footnotes and bibliographies. Cox has the undated Preface signed by
‘J.J. Antrobus, Professor of Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction, University
of Cambridge’.68 The notion of ‘Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction’ is
something which might appeal to us precisely because it underlines the
fictionalization of the factual within this and many other neo-Victorian
narratives; even Antrobus’s name is a trick, possibly derived as it is
from the Latin for front (anterus) and the Italian for hollow (buso) – the
professor is here a ‘hollow front’ to the fiction, a pun on the concept
of authenticity as much as a dig at neo-Victorian criticism’s compet-
ing terminologies of the ‘neo’, ‘faux’, ‘retro’, and ‘post’ prefixes. Cox’s
prefatory statement thus raises multiple questions: how can a text be
post-authentic, something quite different from the idea of being beyond
authentication? And is not this an important part of the ethical and
aesthetic problem embedded within the neo-Victorian project: that con-
temporary novelists cannot, strictly speaking and no matter how much
they desire to do so, write a Victorian novel? What is the relationship
between the Victorian and its prefix? In what sense can these texts align
themselves, even as historical fictions, into this position?

24 Neo-Victorianism
It is in this respect that the neo-Victorian presents a very distinct case

in the broader genre of historical fiction. There are not many references
to a neo-Roman, neo-Classical, neo-medieval, or neo-Renaissance fic-
tion, yet neo-Victorian has stuck and as a genre will continue to stick
with us. More importantly, what do such a title and such a genre say

about contemporary fiction and its place, even its questionable rooted-
ness, in the contemporary world? Attempts have been made elsewhere
to combine these elements in an assessment of how the neo-Victorian
relates to the contemporary. As Sanders comments:
the Victorian era proves in the end ripe for appropriation because
it throws into sharp relief many of the overriding concerns of the
postmodern era: questions of identity; of environmental and genetic
conditioning; repressed and oppressed modes of sexuality; criminal-
ity and violence; the urban phenomenon; the operations of law
and authority; science and religion; the postcolonial legacies of the
empire. In the rewriting of the omniscient narrator of nineteenth-
century fiction, often substituting for him/her the unreliable narrator
we have recognized as common to appropriative fiction, postmodern
authors find a useful metafictional method for reflecting on their
own creative authorial impulses.69
While there can be little doubt that elements of this assessment are cor-
rect, especially the reference to contemporary authors’ ‘own creative . . .
impulses’, the first part of the analysis seems also to do precisely what
so much of contemporary neo-Victorian fiction does: that is, blur the
distinctions between us and those no-longer-Othered Victorians. Are
the Victorians like us? Do we seek to be like the Victorians? In both
cases the answer is likely to be a resounding ‘No’. So why this continued
and perpetual return to the fictional realms of the Victorian, as both
readers and writers? Can the relationship be understood, in the words of
Kaplan, as based in the very fact of aesthetic, ethic, and cultural differ-
ence and similarity, the sense that ‘[t[he Victorian age is at once ghostly
and tangible, an origin and an anachronism’?70
Perhaps most interestingly, recent fiction has started to conceptual-
ize this ghostly indebtedness to the Victorians. To take just two texts
that reached particular prominence in 2007, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil
Beach and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip: both novels were longlisted, then
shortlisted, and alternated as favourites to win the Man Booker Prize.
More importantly, both texts are attempts to re-negotiate a settlement
which is hospitable towards and distant from our Victorian pasts. While

Introduction 25
McEwan’s novella provides an account that bears relation to Matthew

Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (begun in 1849 but published in 1867) in its
focus on the ramifications of the belated 1950s version of the Victorian
honeymoon experience, Jones’s novel about racialized tension and post-
colonial civil war draws explicitly on Dickens’s Great Expectations. The

use of Arnold in the McEwan text is less direct than in his deliberately
unbelievable, unaccountable, and anachronistically volatile insertion of
the poem into a moment of crisis in Saturday (2005). Yet the fact that
the text haunts, ghosts, and demands reinterpretation in both of his
most recent texts suggest something about this post-Victorian landscape
in which we live; indeed, as we discuss in more detail in Chapter 4,
there is an increasing relevance about the spectrality trope and the idea
of haunting in neo-Victorian literature and criticism.71 It is not easy to
theorize this in the case of Saturday and On Chesil Beach: is McEwan’s
indebtedness and need to open his texts to the cultural idea(l)s of Arnold
part of a more general social mo(ve)ment or is it an individualized
interpretation? What is it about Arnold that is being utilized here, and
does that use have the potential to make us rethink our relationship to
the nineteenth-century text? In the case of McEwan’s use of Arnold in
Saturday, what remains most fascinating is the series of misappropria-
tions that he establishes in relation to the authorship of the text. In an
ultimately clichéd way, ‘Dover Beach’ ‘speaks’ to the violent criminal,
Baxter, and prevents the rape of the young woman reading the text;
however, this young woman is insistently identified as the poet by the
criminal: ‘You wrote that. You wrote that.’72 Is Baxter’s refrain here a
comment by McEwan about his lack of knowledge concerning Victorian
poetry (unlikely) or an ironic swipe at the way in which texts now float
free of their authorial attribution and are open to manipulation, misat-
tribution, misappropriation, because the chronologies of literary time
have somehow ceased to function? More fundamentally, what does it
mean to do this to Victorian texts, and are they any longer Victorian or
neo-Victorian texts when it is done?
Mister Pip presents a more direct and open engagement with the (mis)uses
of Victorian literature in the contemporary international context. The
novel’s (un)easy conflation of the nineteenth-century fictional text by
Dickens with the text we read, however, might be interpreted as a com-
ment not only on the enduring influence of the Victorian novel on world
literature, specifically in its status as a landmark Bildungsroman, but also
as an underlining of a continued desire to understand and reinterpret
such narratives within more global, intellectualized, and also, impor-
tantly, emotionalized parameters. The concluding lines of Jones’s novel

26 Neo-Victorianism
indicate a power in the nineteenth-century story that leads ultimately to

a reductiveness of the twentieth-century heroine’s lived experience:
The Mr Dickens I had known also had a beard and a lean face and
eyes that wanted to leap from his face. But my Mr Dickens used to

go about barefoot and in a buttonless shirt. Apart from special occa-
sions, such as when he taught, and then he wore a suit.
It has occurred to me only recently that I never once saw him with
a machete – his survival weapon was story. And once, a long time
ago and during very difficult circumstances, my Mr Dickens had
taught every one of us kids that our voice was special, and we should
remember this whenever we used it, and remember that whatever
else happened to us in our lives our voice could never be taken away
from us.
For a brief time I had made the mistake of forgetting that lesson.
In the worshipful silence I smiled at what else they didn’t know.
Pip was my story, even if I was once a girl, and my face black as the
shining night. Pip is my story, and in the next day I would try where
Pip had failed. I would try to return home.73
Interestingly, what seems to be desired in and through Mister Pip is not

the potential for a postcolonial critique of Dickens’s Great Expectations
(1860–61) but a re-assertion of the themes of emotional authenticity
and sincerity within individual human relationships. It might be no
coincidence, then, that these very same themes are now coming forth
into a series of new debates within Victorian studies too, and that feel-
ing and the affective are re-entering critical discourse on this period.
But Mister Pip is a strange hybrid of the postcolonial and the Victorian.
At the novel’s end we are left with the question of whether the narra-
tor, in reinventing Dickens and in rereading incessantly his novel Great
Expectations as somehow a text personal to her, has been strengthened or
conned; what does it really mean for her to have her own ‘Mr Dickens’?
For is not that final longing to ‘return home’ little more than nostalgia
in its older sense, a kind of cultural sickness that distorts the mind rather
than liberating its potential? If the narrator always has her voice, why
must she read herself as ‘Pip’, indeed what does it mean for Pip to be
her ‘story’? This odd and in some senses traumatic moment of the text
demands a different kind of criticism, for Mister Pip is neither a Victorian
nor neo-Victorian text but lies in a different sphere as both critique and
appropriation, acknowledgement and challenge, the colonizing and the
postcolonial moment. What we need to be initiating is a debate about

Introduction 27
how this text ‘fits’ into the critical and creative landscape, and how its
rereading and re-visioning of the Victorian needs in itself to be reinter-
preted within the multiple cultural moments it (re-)enacts. Mister Pip,
then, like many other recent neo-Victorian fictions, is a text which both
reads and must be read in new ways.

The question that arises, then, is what exactly we (and Zadie Smith)
want the twenty-first-century novel to be and to do? Is it to be mere
mimicry or pastiche: the Victorian novels the Victorians themselves
would have written had they lived now (a dubious proposition in its
own ways)? Or is there a deeper aesthetic and ultimately ethical choice
to be made here about the kinds of narrative that continue to appeal,
the comfort we still desire, from the classic realist mode? Perhaps what
this search for endings really signifies is the fact that we have not been
able to bring the Victorian narrative to a conclusion yet?
From a cynical point of view there is of course the unavoidable fact
that there is a neo-Victorian market sales corollary: just as the adapta-
tion of a classic Victorian novel for the TV ensures increased sales, espe-
cially of the TV-tie-in, so sales for contemporary novels feed into the
purchase of rights for the adaptation which in turn, when broadcast,
leads to increased sales for the contemporary novel (see Chapter 6 for
a discussion of related themes). Historical fiction sells, and Victorian
historical fiction sells better than most. But beneath the neo-Victorian
fiction resides the question: what does it mean to appropriate the
Victorians to suit our needs? Is the recitation of Arnold in McEwan’s
Saturday a neo-Victorian moment? McEwan’s use of Arnold raises that
more fundamental problem of how we use the Victorian literary and
cultural heritage that surrounds us without undermining the distinc-
tive, important, and definitive differences between the periods. Is the
neo-Victorian merely a serviceable form that we can manipulate to
satiate our appetites for stories with closure unlike real life, or is it for
the exploration of themes that continue to dominate our political and
social lives that can be projected backwards onto our forebears in an
attempt to find resolution or to pass the blame? Just as the Victorian
novelists sought a textual resolution for the industrial problems in their
new cities, perhaps we seek a textual salvation in mimicking them as
a salve to our (post)modern condition? Neo-Victorianism, like other
historical fiction, might prove right the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s com-
ment that ‘all history is contemporary history in fancy dress’,74 and per-
haps neo-Victorian texts are contemporary fiction in funny costumes.
In the end, however, the ethical question, like the aesthetic one, lurks
at the margins, or in the footnotes, of our appropriations.

28 Neo-Victorianism
2 Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the

twenty-first century
In the following chapters, we explore the diverse range of generic and

cultural uses to which the neo-Victorian has been put in the period

1999–2009. We begin with a chapter which locates itself around ideas
of memory, mourning, and inheritance. Chapter 1 explores the inter-
relationships between ideas of collective trauma, loss, and familial or
cultural heritage across both textual and narrative forms (the use of
fictional autobiography; journals; manuscript; patchwork texts; diary
entries and so on) that return us to nineteenth-century and Gothic
writing, and also involve the portrayal of distinctly maternal legacies
of identity and meaning. Using feminist and psychoanalytic theoretical
perspectives, this chapter explores the novels Misfortune (Wesley Stace,
2005), Grange House (Sarah Blake, 2000), The Thirteenth Tale (Diane
Setterfield, 2006), and The Ghost Writer (John Harwood, 2004). Here
the belatedness of the neo-Victorian text is prominent because of
the novels’ engagement with concepts of allusion, rewriting, narrative
(de)construction, and the fabric of language and its hold over identity,
especially in relation to issues of memory and heritage. Each text is
concerned with the notion of inheritance and ancestral destiny, often
coupled with the need to instigate a new discourse of the historic for
the nineteenth-century/contemporary periods’ interrelationship across
familial narrative threads. Frequently it is the domestic location of the
family home that serves as an important link to the generational past
of the protagonists, and this in itself marks out the potential for a core
sense of the matrilineal nature of the inheritances at risk. But these
domestic spaces are also regularly configured as spaces of reading, writ-
ing, and narration that serve as metahistorical and metanarrative points
of fixity through which the central characters receive and deal with
traumatic historical narratives, and in which they come to understand
that the very act of storytelling and (self)narration in relation to the
historical past serves as a cathartic moment of traumatic unveiling so
essential to providing a resolution.
Drawing on the theme of trauma, Chapter 2 turns attention to issues
of inheritance and neo-Victorian spaces as configured through notions
of the postcolonial. ‘Postcolonial Neo-Victorians’ seeks to problematize
the use of Victorian Orientalism and the postcolonial conceptualiza-
tion of subalternity through the examination of a range of geographic
and temporal locations. From 1830s India in Amitav Gosh’s Sea of
Poppies (2008) through to early twentieth-century Egypt in The Map

Introduction 29
of Love (1999) by Ahdaf Soueif and Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of

Nothing (2009) via Laura Fish’s reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in
Strange Music (2008), our discussion scrutinizes these writers’ interroga-
tions of the politics of race, slavery, empire, and oppression. Using the
established work of postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Homi

Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, particularly on the nature of
the subaltern’s speech, we position these texts as a creative challenge
to and engagement with such theoretical positioning. The Empire and
imperial identity were crucial to the Victorians’ sense of their individual
power and collective purpose. What we explore in this chapter is the
way in which contemporary writers aim to reinterpret the identity poli-
tics of imperialism through giving voice not only to the colonial subject
but also to writers and thinkers within the imperial elite. As such, the
creative acts of reimagining serve as potent and important reminders of
the complexities of terminologies, identities, and subjectivities.
From the sense of the domestic as a scene of historical trauma and
global political contexts, Chapter 3 moves the focus of the discussion
onto the interrelationships between the themes of sex and science,
most often located in the body of the female. The politics of bodily
identity and misappropriation in conjunction within emerging scien-
tific discourses in the nineteenth century serves as the backdrop for an
exploration of the cultural, social, and political renegotiations of science
and sexuality as they are investigated in recent female-authored neo-
Victorian texts. Thinking through the concept of the (female) body as
a site of textual and sexual inscription, this chapter focuses on Belinda
Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006) and relates its central meta-
phor of the body as (book/skin) binding to Victorian pornographic para-
digms. In our problematization of the nineteenth century’s own textual,
physical, and scientific inscriptions of the classed, gendered, and raced
body, we follow through contemporary reconstructions of the period’s
invasive gaze at the body of woman via Starling’s text and two other
novels, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003), a neo-nineteenth-
century novel set in the 1810s, and Jane Harris’s The Observations
(2006), the tale of a servant–mistress relationship in the mid-Victorian
period. Chase-Riboud’s narrative is placed into the context of a spate
of recent non-fictional resurrections of the story of Saartjie Baartman,
‘the Hottentot Venus’, but is also read through an interconnected web
of theoretical perspectives which incorporate issues of objectification,
scopophilia, and the pornographic gaze, in order to inspect the appro-
priation of a range of nineteenth-century cultural, sexual, and bodily
moments and the resonances such appropriation carries today.

30 Neo-Victorianism
From the looking-glass of self-observation and the lens of the scientist

in Chapter 3, we move to an exploration of glass as a specific neo-
Victorian trope in Chapter 4. This chapter focuses on the spectral and
the s(p)ecular by examining the idea of glass in the Victorianist Isobel
Armstrong’s work as a means of reading the use of glass motifs in a selec-

tion of neo-Victorian fictions as a reflection on Victorian issues of faith.
For example, Jem Poster’s 2002 novel Courting Shadows, which concerns
the restoration of an ancient church during the 1890s, has as its central
image the decaying façade of the pre-Victorian place of worship, thus
providing a useful metaphor for one of the themes of neo-Victorianism’s
project of looking backward. Grounded as they are in a post-religious
age, many contemporary novels pay little attention to the dominance
of religious modes in the nineteenth century and instead focus on the
more spiritualist concerns of the later Victorian period. It is this empha-
sis on ‘ghosting’, by which we mean both the endurance of the past in
the present and the attempt to somehow represent spectral experience
of that past in the way of a late-Victorian séance that provides the focus
for this chapter. Using Charles Palliser’s The Unburied (1999), a story
which deploys the device of a mediaeval manuscript to lure us away
from more contemporaneous events, and Poster’s novel, in which the
restorer of the church actually inflicts damage on the ancient fabric of
the building and the surrounding community, we examine how these
texts chart the potential dangers of falling into an (a)historical reading
of the present in the context of the Victorian period; in other words,
the dangers in looking back when one should be thinking within the
present. We follow this with discussions of Byatt’s latest novel, The
Children’s Book (2009), and Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter
(2008). Both novels draw on the image of glass as a central feature
in their elaboration of the themes of faith and belief in the Victorian
period on the one hand (Hore) and the historical looking-glass of the
imaginary on the other (Byatt). Our final text in this chapter, John
Harwood’s The Séance (2008), reveals another aspect to the play at work
in neo-Victorianism. In placing emphasis on the idea of the spectral
manifestation as trickery or as a subversion of the belief in both histori-
cal accuracy and rationalism/scientific scepticism, Harwood positions
his mid-Victorian characters within nineteenth-century debates about
the role of faith in an emergent secular approach to issues of human
experience, perception and identity.
Whether or not the ghosts and spectres discussed in Chapter 4 demon-
strate an authentic sense of the Victorians’ willingness to believe in
something beyond this world, Chapter 5, ‘Doing It With Mirrors, or

Introduction 31
Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic’, makes clear that

their fascination with magic, illusion, and the possibilities of trickery
for both entertainment and more metaphysical reasons is also at the
core of many neo-Victorian texts and films. As a form of historical fic-
tion, the neo-Victorian is partly driven by illusion and fabrication, but

when working at the highest levels of sophistication, it also serves a self-
conscious purpose of highlighting the nature of the ‘trick’ or game being
played with readers, viewers, and critics. Using Patricia Waugh’s defini-
tion of metafiction as a starting point, this chapter explores the specific
parameters of the term within its relationship to neo-Victorianism.
Drawing on the history of late-Victorian magic in order to illuminate
parallels between the conjuror and the contemporary author or director,
we argue that combining such Victorian narratives of stage illusion with
more contemporary theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and the concepts
of simulation and hyperreality allows us to access the multiple levels
of metatextual play provided by a number of recent narratives: Sarah
Waters’s Affinity (1999), Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006), Neil
Burger’s film The Illusionist (2006), adapted from Steven Millhauser’s
‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990), and Christopher Nolan’s film The
Prestige (2006), based on Christopher Priest’s eponymous novel of 1995.
Our argument resides in the interpretation of the trope of the trick and
how it always returns us to a self-reflection on the nature of our engage-
ment and desire in relation to the neo-Victorian (literary/filmic) text.
Our final chapter broadens out some of the key themes discussed in
terms of literary engagements with the (neo-)Victorian by examining
how neo-Victorianism functions in the mainstream marketplace through
different media. ‘The Way We Adapt Now, or the Neo-Victorian Theme
Park’ outlines the recent furore over the creation of ‘Dickens World’, a
theme park based on the works of Victorian England’s most popular nov-
elist, which has illustrated in an uncomfortable way the means by which
reinterpretations of Victorian writers or writing can all too easily descend
into the realms of farce. This concluding chapter therefore interrogates the
nature of a more general cultural appropriation of the Victorian within
the broader sense of TV, film, theatrical and ‘heritage industry’ adapta-
tions of the nineteenth century. It thus picks up on some of the themes of
previous chapters by suggesting ways in which literary and ‘high’ cultural
appropriations of the nineteenth century intersect and differ from the
popular imaginary and its conceptualizations of the ‘Other’ Victorians.
Issues discussed include contemporary TV and film adaptations, the
concept of the ‘Victorian’ theme-park as an enduring visual, architec-
tural and adapted landscape within twenty-first-century understandings

32 Neo-Victorianism
of heritage; and popular (mis)encounters with the Victorian text such

as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 musical version of The Woman in White
directed by Trevor Nunn. The aim of this chapter is to think about the
ways in which the neo-Victorian project in wider cultural terms runs
the risk of fulfilling one of its earliest critiques as presented in Brian

Moore’s 1975 novel The Great Victorian Collection, where it is a material-
ist commodity culture (often in relation to pornographic Victoriana)
that becomes the defining feature of a post-war, Disneyfied notion of
the nineteenth century. Specific neo-Victorian adaptations explored
in the course of the chapter, in addition to those outlined above,
include the BBC’s Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford, Bleak House
and Little Dorrit. The final part of the chapter takes Andrew Davies’
most recent work on Dickens and Waters as a case study of the inter-
relationships between adaptations. Informed by Linda Hutcheon’s book
A Theory of Adaptation, what lies at the heart of this analysis is the con-
cept of the palimpsestuous nature of adaptation, the interlocking and
interpenetrating engagements between adaptations not only of the
same text but also texts of the same period that invoke a sense of heritage
Victoriania or televisual nostalgia.
3 Going forward, looking backward
As the discussion of our final chapter indicates, we are concerned here

with neo-Victorianism in its widest adaptive and appropriative impulses.
But we read these different textual paradigms through very clear criteria
which emphasize the need for critical inflection, metafictional play, and
an awareness of the creative possibilities of the genre. Ultimately, this
book is about the conjunction, difference, and similarity between two
distinct historical periods: the nineteenth and early twenty-first centu-
ries. As Victorianists we are fascinated by the ways in which contempo-
rary culture seeks to return us to, develop us from, and connect us with
our Victorian precursors. The fact that these connections are established
through such a diverse range of genres, styles, media, and political or
theoretical viewpoints means that the vibrancy of Victorian studies as a
discipline can be usefully aligned with the contemporaneous emergence
of the ‘New Victorians’. Wherever possible, therefore, we connect our
discussion of contemporary cultural debates and modes with similar
trends in Victorian studies itself. Neo-Victorianism represents a wide
range of experimentations, and traditions, and this book aims to pro-
vide an analytical framework for reading a genre whose influence seems
likely to continue its growth over the coming years.

1
Memory, Mourning, Misfortune:
Ancestral Houses and (Literary)

Inheritances
When my mother died, a year or so back, it fell to my

brother and me to clear her house. . . . She had a dual
existence, tough and job-oriented during the day . . .
while at home . . . she was closer to Miss Havisham . . .
My mother lived in her memories. Day-to-day events
were considered in relation to past experience . . . When
the house was burgled and she lost some treasures . . .
she mourned not so much for the objects, but for
that part of her own past world which had gone . . .
She needed memory to define herself . . . When we
made a bonfire in the back garden and burned the
cheque stubs, we committed her to the flames almost as
certainly as, at the cemetery, we had lowered her coffin
into the ground.
Steven Rose, The Making of Memory (1992)1
‘Hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences.’ Their

symptoms, [Freud] suggests, are ‘residues and mnemic
symbols of particular (traumatic) experiences’, symbols
which function in the patient’s psyche like public
‘monuments and memorials’ . . . The history of feeling
that narrative or visual Victoriana seeks at once to
memorialise and renew for the modern reader . . . has
something in common with the overemotional response
to historical trauma that Freud described . . . It might
be an association too far to align the writer or reader
of modern Victoriana with Freud’s hysteric, yet his
urban analogy catches something about . . . Victoriana’s
33

34 Neo-Victorianism
affective relationship to the past and to its compulsive

recycling of Victorian material and discursive culture.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana (2007)2
In its parodic performance of belatedness3 neo-Victorian fiction is

engaged on reconfiguring the painful reminiscences of Freud’s and
Breuer’s fin-de-siècle hysterics4 into cultural memorials of nostalgic desire,
postmodernism’s intertextual playfulness, or postcolonial ‘rememory’
(Toni Morrison’s concept of the communal remembrance of collective
trauma).5 Loss, mourning, and regeneration are prototypical preoccu-
pations of the neo-Victorian novel, which often revolves around the
re(dis)covery of a personal and/or collective history and the restitu-
tion of a family inheritance through the reconstruction of fragmented,
fabricated, or repressed memories: a retracing and piecing together of
the protagonist’s roots which reflects, metafictionally, on the literary
‘origins’ of the neo-Victorian genre and the narratological traditions it
seeks to reshape.
That the processes of anamnesis bear resemblance to the creative
labour of authorship, are even constitutive of it, is signalled through
narrative form in these texts: fictional autobiography; a journal which
in the course of the narrative is shaped into a manuscript and by its
close is ready for publication or is indeed published; a patchwork of
texts, fictional and factual. Historical and contemporary identities, nar-
rators, voices, letters, diary entries, recollections, reflections, dreams,
and documentary sources all blend together, mimicking the narrative
devices, structures, and collage techniques of nineteenth-century and
Victorian realist and Gothic literature, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights (1847) to Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883).
Just as the protagonists set out to retrieve their fractured pasts, so the
novels themselves typically invoke what Cora Kaplan, in invocation
of Freud, calls the ‘mnemic sybols’ and affective-psychological monu-
ments of Victorian fiction: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles
Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
(1898) – the story of the orphan girl made good and the emergence of
a feminist consciousness, collectivized through the narrator’s address
to the reader; Bildung initiated and ruptured by originary tales and
surrogate families which prove to be illusionary; unreliable narrators,
hysteria, and the complexities of adult–child relationships governed
by desire, fear, and fantasy. These texts and their epic characters and
plots feature prominently in the neo-Victorian fictional imagination.

Memory, Mourning, Misfortune 35
And not only in the fictional imagination: it is surely no accident that

biologist Steven Rose begins the titular chapter (‘Making Memories’) of
his neuroscientific study on memory with a personal reminiscence
of his mother and a reference to that Victorian literary paradigm of a life
worn out in its obsessive-compulsive focus on the past, Miss Havisham.

The legacies of a Miss Havisham character play a significant role in
many neo-Victorian novels, and are of pivotal importance to three of
the texts explored in this chapter.
Memory, mourning, misfortune: one of the most abiding and recurring
plots in neo-Victorianism is that dealing with a misplaced, hidden or
disrupted legacy, a ‘missed fortune’. Like the Victorian novelists them-
selves, contemporary writers from Charles Palliser (Quincunx, 1989) and
A.S. Byatt (Possession, 1990) onwards have been preoccupied with the
development of broken lineages which their texts set out to recover and
heal, in a manner evocative of the relationships drawn up in literary
histories, highlighting the connections between the neo-Victorian novel
itself and the Victorian precursor text. But this is often not a simple matter
of delineating the bonds between the nineteenth-century Urtext and con-
temporary fiction; it is more complicated because that very relationship
reveals multiple perspectives on the present’s concepts of history and
also the fundamental sense of mourning exhibited in post-millennial
literature that consciously seeks to echo the certainties and formalism
of the classic Victorian novel while simultaneously adding new per-
spectives on both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The core
texts of this chapter – Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2005), Sarah Blake’s
Grange House (2000), Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), and
John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) – are therefore concerned with
inheritances in a broad sense that encompasses ideas about realism,
factual accuracy, literary fantasy, and the portrayal and development
of a hybrid nineteenth-century/contemporary language of the historic.
While this new language offers the potential articulation of the hidden
pasts of the nineteenth century, here we explore the theoretical and aes-
thetic motives and motifs behind the attempt to reconstruct a sense of
familial/literary/canonical inheritance from the Victorians themselves.
The central metaphor of (dis)inheritance and mourning in these
novels is the ancestral home: a house haunted by past tragedy and
dominated by a dead or dying woman; a feminized space which in
the imagination and memories of those exiled from it represents a lost
Eden, but which constitutes itself as dangerous and disputed territory
for the protagonist: a site of alienation, betrayal, extreme disillusion-
ment, ferocious sibling rivalry, harrowing family collapse, even mortal

36 Neo-Victorianism
combat. The house – that material testimonial to the family’s past, its
idiosyncrasies, sorrows, and secrets – has its spiritual counterpart in the
library (in the novels usually a female-governed space) which safeguards
familial records, while connecting personal history with the collective
history of ideas and the literature of past ages. Abandoned or demol-

ished at the end, the house and its library embody womb and tomb in
one: a maternal legacy for both male and female heirs, an heirloom con-
cealed within and recovered through books and manuscript materials,
which, passed from one generation to the next, threatens to repeat itself
until it is laid to rest through a quasi-Freudian talking and writing cure
by the protagonist who finds the courage to lay claim to an identity
born from traumatic history.
The reconstruction of the past through reading, writing, and
re-narration assumes not only part of the life, but becomes the life of
the hero/ine, who attains a deeper level of self-knowledge through
and in the story s/he records, and through which s/he confronts the
demons in her or his own life: a metaphoric re-enactment of the neo-
Victorian novel’s self-constitution through its Victorian referents. Thus
in Grange House seventeen-year-old Maisie Thomas decides to write a
memoir of her father in order to come to terms with his death, and
in the process discovers his love of a woman other than her mother,
the mysterious Miss Grange who always presided over their family
holidays. In a dream the story of the tragic lovers merges with Maisie’s
sense of affinity with the woman she now believes to be the mother of
a half-sister; the diary with which Miss Grange entrusted her assumes
the shape of a book authored by herself, the book Miss Grange has
been urging her to write:
That night I dreamed such wildness – of two lovers who rowed out into
the middle of a black lake and drowned there while I watched them
sink. . . . I felt myself falling down, away down, into a soft darkness . . .
I sensed a woman falling beside me . . . she held her hand to mine and
uttered my name. But I had the peculiar sensation that I was reading a
book all the while . . . and I was strangely aware even while I dreamed
that the story I was reading was a story I had written[.]6
The novel ends with Maisie’s recovery of her lost sister (a reclamation with
a twist) and her publication of her family story as a legacy for her own
children. Likewise, Margaret Lea, in The Thirteenth Tale, finds that in the
course of listening to, and composing the official biography of, the enig-
matic writer Vida Winter, she is subsumed into her story of sibling love

and sibling violence: ‘I listened to her story, I wrote the story, when I slept
I dreamt the story, and when I was awake it was the story that formed
the constant backdrop of my thoughts. It was like living entirely inside a
book.’7 Having become one with the story, Margaret emerges reconciled
to her past and a writer in her own right. Misfortune, too, enacts a slip-

page between literature and traumatic experience. The novel returns us
both to Victorian and classical culture by having the hero recover from
his gender/identity crisis through acting out popular forms of eighteenth
and nineteenth-century balladry and adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses as
a model for his autobiographical narrative: ‘I was breathing life into the
book, and the book was breathing back out through me’.8 Story-telling,
listening (bearing witness), and writing are acts of catharsis which redeem
the past and, by releasing the family ghosts and salvaging the haunted
house for literature, bring about a profound transformation of the pro-
tagonists’ lives.
1.1 Meta-morphoses: Classical, (early)modern, and

neo-Victorian echoes in Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2005)
The complex relationship between literature, a lost matrilineage, sibling

interaction, and authorship is explored in carnivalesque detail in Stace’s
novel about Rose Old, daughter of Geoffrey Loveall of Love Hall. The tit-
ular ‘Miss Fortune’ (79) is heiress to a large estate coveted by greedy rela-
tives with Dickensian depravities. Rose’s ‘misfortune’ resides in the secret
carefully guarded by her parents until her late teens that, having been
rescued from a dumping site, she is neither their biological offspring, nor
indeed a girl. In his lifelong mourning for his sister Dolores, who died at
the age of five when he was seven, Geoffrey denies anatomical facts and
conceives of the newborn picked up on the wayside as a reincarnation
of his beloved Dolly. Rose is named after the Loveall coat of arms, the
rose and briar intertwined, invoking both his composite genders and
the family myth of forbidden love united in death, memorialized in the
tomb (a copy of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus) that a previous Loveall
heiress erected for her brother/husband in the grounds of the estate. In
his tragicomic version of his real-life contemporary Byron’s incestuous
desire,9 Geoffrey never leaves the nursery for long, and until his death
in middle age seeks comfort in his sister’s walk-in doll’s house, which
recreates Love Hall in every detail and even contains a miniature ver-
sion of itself that Geoffrey believes harbours the spirit of his lost Doll/y:
a hall of mirrors emblematic of his fixation with the past and resistance
to engaging with any reality beyond that of his inner life. This internal

38 Neo-Victorianism
world was shattered like their previously indestructible house of cards

when Dolly died falling off a tree; Geoffrey ‘spent the rest of his life
recovering, unable to understand that he wasn’t to blame’ (27). In one of
many intertextual allusions to Byatt’s Possession the dead ‘Dolly keeps a
Secret’:10 Dolly’s Nutcrackers, the key to the siblings’ book of riddles, Nuts

to Crack, remains hidden in her tree of death. When many years later
it is recovered accidentally, Geoffrey is finally able to solve the puzzle
they had attempted to answer before her death and which had defied
him all his life: an optical illusion, in which seemingly random inkblots,
when viewed from a particular angle, assume the shape of a tree.
The recuperation of The Nutcrackers coincides with the beginning of
Rose’s desperate quest for his true origins: the ‘key’ to his inheritance,
as much as to Dolly’s death, is a tree, in his case the family tree of the
Lovealls. As Rose’s adoptive mother Anonyma Wood (her name another
pun on the semiotics of trees), first governess then wife of convenience
to Geoffrey, discovers in her painstaking analysis of a female mystical
poet’s manuscript collection held in the Loveall library, Mary Day was
the pseudonym of Marguerite d’Eustache, the third, run-away, wife of
‘Bad Lord Loveall’, Geoffrey’s grandfather. The broken family lineage is
restored when a popular ballad reproducing Rose’s childhood story of a
baby’s miraculous rescue from a waste ground is traced back to the man
who as a boy had been charged with disposing of the newborn. The
mother of the infant, who died of her botched attempt at abortion, is
revealed to be Bryony Day, Mary Day’s granddaughter. Rose, it emerges,
is, and always has been, the legitimate heir of Love Hall.
This plot of the loss and recovery of an inheritance is embedded within
a set of literary references which constitute a second legacy, in which
Rose’s psychological quasi-intersex condition is represented on the page
as intertext (biologically male, he is raised as a female, and develops
an ‘intermediate’ identity expressed in adulthood in his conjunction
of ‘female’ dress and male facial hair). From early adolescence onwards
Rose seeks an answer to the enigma of his life in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
A painting representing the birth of Hermaphroditus in his enforced
union with Salmacis11 sets the scene for Rose’s later flight to Turkey and
immersion in the lake named after the nymph. From the vantage point
of the elderly narrator looking back on his life, this was the moment of
transformation which, in his enactment of the classical myth, enabled
him to accept his doubly-gendered self. His ‘rebirth’ as a compositely
gendered subject is preceded by the collapse of his identity as daughter
and heiress of the Loveall estate, a crisis that culminates in an hys-
terical illness during which he works through traumatic memories of

sexual abuse suffered on his journey by reciting passages from popular

women warrior ballads about female cross-dressers such as ‘The Rose
of Britain’s Isle’, ‘The Banks of the Nile’, ‘The Female Rambling Sailor’,
‘The Young Sailor Bold’, ‘Lisbon’, ‘The Silk-Merchant’s Daughter’, ‘The
Female Drummer’ (303, 304, 339).12

While in the ballads gender imposture is motivated by women’s desire
to reunite with their lovers and lead a life of adventure, Rose is driven
by the need to find a resolution to his hybrid sense of gender. As Dianne
Dugaw has illustrated, female warrior ballads of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries extolled the feisty, valiant, and eminently successful
heroine, who combined ‘manly’ (assertive, aggressive) and ‘womanly’
(loyal and virtuous) qualities in equal measure, thus reflecting the
‘hermaphroditic ideal’ of the time. Nineteenth-century versions, by con-
trast, often displayed a more ambivalent approach to the cross-dresser,
who was represented as more timid and inherently feminine, and whose
masquerade was therefore fragile and easily uncovered.13 This also proves
to be the case for Rose, albeit with a twist: dressed female, he attracts
sexual attention, and when revealed to be a man is subjected to assault,
as a result of which he realizes that it was ‘impossible for me to travel in
my real [women’s] clothes, so I took to disguise’ (313, emphases added).
Stace thus queers the already gender-bending ballads by creating a male
protagonist whose cross-gender attire constitutes no act of transvestism,
manifesting at it does his childhood conditioning, but who finds himself
forced to ‘cross-dress’ in the conventional costume of his sex. At the same
time he problematizes the popular celebration of gender transgression as
an exhilarating and pleasurable experience (any potential threat of which
is defused by marriage in the ballads) by highlighting the violence which
attends the exposure of (sexual) deviance (Rose’s victimization suggests
that male heterosexual posturing, especially of the predatory pack men-
tality type, conceals repressed homosexual desires). The authentic sources
reproduced in the novel are doubly fictionalized in that they form the
backdrop of Rose’s recovery process, which is recounted by a different –
unambiguously female-gendered and female-sexed – first-person narrator
(Frances Cooper, the daughter of the English archaeologist in whose
Turkish home Rose finds a refuge), while simultaneously drawing on
Stace’s stage persona John Wesley Harding’s 2005 song cycle performed
by Love Hall Tryst.14
Stace’s postmodern play with classical and modern historical sources,
broadsheet ballads, popular culture and song is further complemented
by his narrator’s parodic self-positioning in relation to the work of emi-
nent eighteenth and nineteenth-century British authors: Henry Fielding,

40 Neo-Victorianism
Jane Austen, and particularly Samuel Richardson are dismissed for their
convoluted naming policy (79), while Laurence Sterne’s metafictional
digressions in Tristram Shandy (1759) and William Makepeace Thackeray’s
puppet master device in Vanity Fair (1848) are co-opted as a model for the
narrator’s reflections on his literary strategies and authorial performance.

Thus he ponders the dramatic mise-en-scène of himself as first-person nar-
rator in part 2 (‘I Am Reborn’), justifying his prior third-person narration
in part 1 (‘Anonymous’) as a reflection of his narrated (infant) self’s as
yet unselfconscious state. Repeated references to the time lapse between
narrated and narrating selves and textual addresses to the reader (which
are then revealed to have been directed at the narrator’s son)15 serve to
maintain the illusion of a fictional autobiography; yet the text also draws
on Anonyma’s and Frances’s journal entries. The autobiographer’s claim
that he will deal ‘only in the truth . . . as I witnessed it’ (77) and that ‘I am
not going to die in my story’ (77) is further destabilized by the Appendix,
which – as in D.J. Taylor’s Kept discussed in the Introduction – offers a
‘Guidebook to Love Hall’ involving a description of Rose’s grave (522). The
visitors’ guide to the stately home and its list of paintings depicting the
central characters is more evocative of Virginia Woolf’s modernist mock-
biography Orlando (1928) than of the devices of Victorian fiction, and
indeed Rose’s life spans an impressive 98 years from the late Regency to
the First World War. The Victorian age is simultaneously framed and side-
lined by the picaresque (as one reviewer remarked, ‘almost symphonic’)16
sweep of the story. Thus Rose comes to a full understanding of his origins
on his eighteenth birthday, the year after Victoria’s ascent to the throne,
but no mention is made of the new Queen, emerging Victorian values,
or any historical events. While Victorian literature features peripherally –
the wicked relatives recall Dickensian figures, and Geoffrey’s withdrawal
to a nursery where time stands still is reminiscent of Miss Havisham’s self-
immurement in Satis House – popular broadsheets originating in early
modern traditions and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are of greater importance to
the self-constitution of the hero than any specifically Victorian literary
or historical referents. With the exception of Victoria, one of the ‘good’
Rakeleigh relatives, who is cast as a socialist Quaker and philanthropist
worker in London’s East End, an early-Victorian forerunner of the fin-de-
siècle New Woman with cropped hair and potential lesbian proclivities,
none of the characters displays a plausible Victorian persona. Anonyma
and the younger generation – Rose and his closest friends and lovers,
Sarah and Stephen Hamilton and Frances Cooper – enjoy manifestly
millennial, not Victorian, sensibilities, sexualities, psychologies, and
vocabularies.

Misfortune has much in common with contemporary trans/gender

novels like Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002), a text which also embeds
the coming-out story of its hermaphroditic hero within the quasi-magic-
realist framework of a family saga rooted in brother–sister incest. Rather
than being conceived as a pastiche of Victorianism, Misfortune parodies

the neo-Victorian imagination in its numerous echoes of Possession.
Rose’s feminist scholar mother Anonyma, who likes nothing better
than sequestering herself in the library, bears distinct affinity to Maud
Bailey, with whom she also shares the analytical close-reading skills with
which each unpicks her favourite poet’s lines in their quest for hidden
messages. The objects of their scholarly desire, Mary Day and Christabel
La Motte, are both mystic poets who create dreamlike, androgynous
myths and utopian worlds, Day’s Feminisia resembling La Motte’s realm
of Melusina. There is no Roland Michell figure, but in Misfortune too
a poet’s letter is purloined by a male scholar, Anonyma’s bookbinder
father, from whom she inherits her passion for the enigmatic Mary Day.
As in Byatt’s novel, the maternal lineage is restored in the discovery of
the protagonist’s direct biological descent.
1.2 ‘My mother not my mother; myself not myself’: The

mother (as) text in Sarah Blake’s Grange House (2000)17
A more multifaceted and perilous maternal legacy is the subject of Blake’s

Grange House and Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale. Here too the protago-
nists are abandoned children, whose lives are profoundly affected by
dysfunctional parental and sibling ties, and who must negotiate a precar-
ious sense of self against the backdrop of past and present family trauma
played out over their bodies. In contradistinction to Misfortune, this does
not involve uncertainties about their gender but, rather, a complex and
multi-layered exploration of the mother–daughter dynamic in relation
to questions of (self-)authorship. Each text depicts a young woman’s
quest for her familial, personal and emerging professional identity
through her relationship with an older woman, a writer, whose life,
unravelled through multiple stories, reveals the origins and concealed
familial bonds of the heroine herself, enabling her to take control of
her life and write herself into being in the textual reconstruction of the
m/other (the mother as other and as self). Both novels invoke pairings
of subversive women characters from Victorian literature, whose spectral
echoes serve to refract and deconstruct the identity of the older woman
in her interaction with the younger: Miss Havisham and Estella in Great
Expectations, Jane and Bertha in Jane Eyre, the two Cathys of Wuthering

42 Neo-Victorianism
Heights, the governess and her charges in The Turn of the Screw, the three
sisters in (Wilkie Collins’s 1860) The Woman in White, Mariana and the
Lady of Shalott in Tennyson’s eponymous poems (1830 and 1832).
In Grange House the uncanny site of obsessive-compulsive disorders
resulting in family tragedy is again the ancestral home, an embodiment

simultaneously of mother, womb, and text: ‘this place at once famil-
iar and always strange’, as Maisie Thomas calls Grange House on her
annual vacation return at the start of Blake’s novel (4). The smudges on
the walls of Miss Grange’s (previously her mother Cassie’s) bedroom, so
evocative of the handprints of a ghostly infant in the first of her stories,
are the visual markers of family dysfunction, the imprint of trauma on
the maternal body reproduced in each generation, and visited on the
daughters, literal and adoptive, whose names are written into the tex-
ture of the building. In Miss Grange’s story Widow (Cassie) Grange, in a
state of acute distress, filled an entire wall of the house with the names
of the Irish women whom she had delivered of babies, and the names of
all the baby girls to whom she gave life (63): affirmation of a maternal
line of descent, or memorial of the survivors, those who through flight
alone were able to escape the national catastrophe? Maisie herself finds
the names of the second generation of Grange women, Susannah and
Amalie (Nell: Miss Grange), carved into the window pane of the latter’s
attic room. The dates that accompany the names, 1847 and 1848, are
more than mere signifiers of the women’s years of birth: coincidental
with the publication dates of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall, and reminiscent of Catherine Earnshaw’s names carved
into the wood in Emily Brontë’s novel, these dates also signpost the root
cause of their Irish-born mother’s profound depression and harrowing
sense of guilt: the Great Famine of 1845–49, to which she sacrificed
her first-born, already tubercular, son, whom, by the insistence of her
own mother, she left behind on her exodus from the homeland. Cassie
spends a lifetime attempting to come to terms with her sense of loss:
‘I saved myself, but I left myself behind’ (65).
The Grange women’s lives follow a seemingly endless cycle of repeti-
tion when Cassie, mourning the loss of her husband Rorie, is overcome
by the memory of the earlier trauma after the arrival of an unknown
nephew from Ireland; she soon becomes obsessed with the irrational
conviction that Hayden Gilroy is her cast-off son returned from the
dead to wreak revenge on the living. When Hayden and Susannah fall
in love, disaster ensues: in Miss Grange’s Gothic version of the story
Hayden, Bertha-Rochester-like, drags mother and sister/lover to their
death with his plunge from the roof of the burning house struck by

lightning. Miss Grange’s diary tells a more tragic sequence of events:

here Hayden, having left Grange House and Susannah after Nell’s
disclosure of their sibling relationship, fatally misunderstands the
girls’ brother George’s reference to ‘our sister’ being ‘with child’ (314):
George means Nell, but Hayden, horrified at the thought of a child

being born from his incestuous union with Susannah, throws himself
off the quarry where they both work, and George dies in the attempt to
save him. Tragedy also befalls the next generation: Nell’s (aptly named)
daughter Perdita, the product of her passionate love affair with Maisie’s
father, is lost; Miss Grange is haunted by her inability to remember what
happened after the birth of her child to result in her death and is forever
compelled to return to the nominal signifier of Perdita, her grave. The
novel starts with the tragic death, presumed suicide, of a pair of lovers;
the young woman, Halcy Ames, Maisie’s best friend in childhood, at the
close of the novel turns out to have been Susannah’s daughter. ‘Myself,
my sister, my mother . . . Ourselves, the very haunting. Ourselves the
very house’ (222): Miss Grange’s lamentation about the eternal repro-
duction of maternal destinies is represented textually in the triadic
structure of the stories told. We are presented with three versions of
Widow Grange’s antecedents, and of Susannah, Nell and their lovers;
three different sets of diary entries; three central narrators, authors
and writers (Nell, Maisie, and Susannah); three stories of Maisie’s birth;
and even three different mothers (Mrs Thomas, Nell, Susannah).
It is this cyclical repetition by variation and daughters forever turning
into their mother’s (or mothers’) echoes (307) that Miss Grange enjoins
Maisie to bring to an end by ‘finish[ing] it [the story] – so it will not
repeat’ (225). As Cassie’s and Miss Grange’s lives indicate, the Freudian
talking cure in itself18 is a beginning, but not sufficient to bring about
a resolution. Nell’s and Susannah’s chronicling of events, in the form of
stories, diaries, and a book of mementos, has been powerless to disrupt
the return of the pattern: with Halcy’s death, Miss Grange tells Maisie,
‘the old story of Grange House was repeated once again . . . Someone
must write the next story to replace the old . . . I pass it on . . . To you. To
write it’ (91). A different kind of Miss Havisham, Nell seeks not revenge
but an ending which leads to a new beginning: ‘write us anew . . . Start
up the story . . . and carry us forward’ (225).
This new story which encapsulates the old but moves into a new
direction is the book we read: a coming-of-age text which provides an
account of two years in Maisie’s life, beginning and ending with two
deaths, each of which affects her profoundly: her childhood friend Halcy
and her father’s, and Miss Grange and her mother’s. Not coincidentally

44 Neo-Victorianism
Maisie’s name recalls the heroine of James’s What Maisie Knew (1897):
this is a story about the repercussions of adultery and betrayal, and
biological and adoptive parenthood, on the mental and emotional
development of the child; but here the child is much older, has a very
close and affectionate bond with her father, and in the course of the

narrative assumes ownership of her life. The threat of a repetition of her
father’s mistake – who, in love with a passionate and intellectual woman
congenial to him, married one that was neither – is averted when Maisie
breaks off her engagement to the businessman of her mother’s choice
and chooses the artistically-minded bohemian suited to her. Similarly,
as a writer and happy lover, she ‘renews’ the story by realizing Nell’s
desire of combining emotional with professional and artistic fulfilment.
From the outset Maisie’s ‘wild longing’ (89) for life and Lady-of-Shalott-
like sense of confinement are bound up with story-telling and coming
to authorship: ‘And I would sit at my window and strain into the dark
behind the glass, longing to see through into the heat of my life, into
the knowledge that I, too, would possess something at the heart of me to
tell’ (11); ‘Let the story begin, I thought impatiently’ (5). Even a moment
of intense confusion and fear, when she perceives a spectral Halcy beck-
oning to her from the garden below, is immediately placed within the
context of literature: it is ‘as if a character had reached out a hand from
the pages of a book and pointed, direct to me’ (16).
Small wonder, perhaps, that Maisie feels a strong kinship with Miss
Grange, a writer (7), an independent, if mysterious, woman, the owner
of the hotel where her family has spent every summer since her early
childhood; and that she is drawn to her further for recognizing in her
visionary ability the emerging writer’s ‘capacity to see . . . [t]o imagine . . .
and so to recognize the hidden story, the hidden life’ (51). At the start
of the novel Maisie has a number of occult experiences: twice the dead
Halcy appears to her, each time as a harbinger of death, and when
Miss Grange takes her to the woods to show her a grave whose story
she wants to tell, Maisie has the sudden vision of a woman in greatest
despair digging at the earth with a spoon: this woman, she believes, was
Miss Grange’s mother (much later she realizes it was Nell herself).
Impressing on Maisie that ‘The best way forward is through the past’
(165), Miss Grange tells her the story of Grange House and the women
within it, and after her father’s death sends her extracts from her diary
which reveal that they were lovers and had a child together. Maisie
returns to Grange House to discover the remainder of the story. Initially
elusive, Miss Grange calls her to her rooms on the night of her death,
and enjoins her to recover and write her sister Perdita’s story. Maisie

is to be Nell’s heir and to assume ownership of Grange House. A final

part of Miss Grange’s legacy are her notebooks: her diary, which Maisie
now reads in its entirety, a book of stories, and a blank book entitled
‘Perdita’: the missing story to be written into existence.
Miss Grange’s diary begins as a record of a writer’s apprenticeship,

where the young Nell, hardly older than Maisie is now, expresses her
professional desire – ‘To be an Author, Reader!’ (149) – and experiments
with different modes of writing: memoir, character study (‘Susannah’,
248), fiction (‘An Introduction to the Granges’, 253), drama (‘My Parlor
Plot’, 174). As the diary and its story of sibling rivalry progress through
the years, a second writer intervenes to contest Nell’s representations and
interpretations: Susannah, erstwhile ‘my best reader’ (173), now competes
for authorship, prompting Nell to take action, with fatal consequences.
Determined that ‘you shall not steal my telling of this tale’ (268), Nell
reasserts her ownership of the family story by convincing Hayden that
he is their brother, thus precipitating a chain of events which lead to his
and George’s death. Her previous diary reflections on the ease with which
the recording of memories lends itself to fictionalization may suggest that
her mother’s mental confusion and inchoate fears about Hayden’s origins
may have been enhanced by Nell in her authorial quest for dramatic
action: ‘what is the distinction between what one imagines and what
one remembers? How often my memory, or my recording of events, slips
the leash – and I wander just a bit further outward – into Possibility –
where what Was and what Might Be are twin sisters on these pages’
(173). In the diary Widow Grange is shown talking to Susannah about
her concern about her evident interest in Hayden; but we only ever have
Nell’s word for what is being said. That the story of her mother’s early
life which she tells Maisie clashes with the one Maisie hears from her
father indicates Miss Grange’s narrative impetus: whereas in Nell’s story
Cassie arrives in America with nothing but the bare clothes on her back,
utterly alone, having abandoned her son in Ireland, in Ludlow Thomas’s
account Cassie was accompanied by her entire family, parents and two
sisters, and there is no mention of any child. In the diary Susannah offers
a third interpretation: she remembers her mother showing her baby curls,
a spoon, and a wedding ring; this version suggests that she lost a child
and husband in Ireland, presumably to the Famine, but she did not aban-
don her son there, nor was he illegitimate. When after the catastrophe
evidence arrives from Ireland to prove that Hayden was not Cassie’s son,
Susannah lays the full blame for events on Nell: ‘You see how your imagi-
nation did break our house?’ (315). The sisters part ways: Nell moves into
the attic, and Susannah below stairs.

46 Neo-Victorianism
But what, Maisie wonders, happened to Susannah? Like Perdita she,

too, must have died. It is only when the woman known to her primarily
as ‘Cook’, Halcy Ames’s mother, the woman disregarded by everybody
because of her lowly station, who like Miss Grange, however, would
always make a ritual of welcoming her to Grange House at the begin-

ning of every vacation, insists on showing her Perdita’s grave that the
final layer of the story is revealed. Blake here uses a similar plot device as
Waters does in Affinity (1999), when it is only at the end that we discover
the prime mover of all action to have been the woman in the shadows,
the working-class subject conceived to serve but not to steer even in our
contemporary imagination. ‘Cook’ turns out to be Susannah, Perdita’s
grave harbours no body, and Maisie learns that the child born to Nell
Grange was none other than herself. The woman digging a grave in the
woods was her own mother, who, never interested in having a child at
the best of times, in her postnatal confusion sought to bury her alive,
perhaps in a symbolic gesture of burying her still-born dreams. Susannah
intervened in time to rescue the child, and persuaded Ludlow Thomas,
whose wife had suffered an hysterical pregnancy, to present Perdita to
her as her own. Neither Nell nor Mrs Thomas were ever told the truth:
thus both were able to have a relationship with Maisie. In profound
shock, Maisie comes to realize that ‘my mother [was] not my mother;
myself not myself’ (356). ‘I am your author’, Susannah asserts, claiming
Nell’s diary discourse and writerly persona for herself: ‘I wrote the story
that brought you from the ground’ (353); ‘It was I gave you life’ (352).
It is Susannah who reconciles her with her dying mother, Mrs Thomas,
when Maisie, mourning her biological mother, turns away from her
adoptive one: ‘Maisie, you had a mother. You had one, and now you
would toss her away because of a thing in a book’ (367).
Both mothers’ purported ignorance about Maisie’s identity appears
implausible. In a conversation with Ludlow Thomas recorded in her
diary the pre-pregnancy Nell expresses her consummate lack of interest
in marriage and motherhood, referring to the belief in women’s inherent
mothering instinct as a social construct (168). Her mental breakdown
can be seen both as a ‘Victorian’ continuation of her mother’s story
(repeating the mother’s legacy of madness so often explored in Victorian
fiction) and as a psychological response to her loss of freedom in bearing
an unwanted child. Her choice of Maisie as her confidante, successor and
heir at her approaching death may indicate that she always knew who
Maisie was but was determined not to embrace motherhood. Similarly,
there is much to suggest that Mrs Thomas was always aware of Maisie’s
provenance, her hysterical illness being likely to have been a desperate

strategy to keep a husband whose passion was so evidently invested

elsewhere locked into his moral and marital responsibilities. While her
father is alive, Maisie is taken aback by her mother’s mimicry of feminine
weakness whenever he is in her company (108). On her deathbed, after
Maisie has poured out the ‘true’ story of her origins, the dying woman

responds not with shock but with a reaffirmation of her love: ‘All your
life . . . I did love you’ (374).
If Nell’s is the voice of rebellion and rejection, Susannah’s is that of
reason and human kindness. Hers is also the voice that challenges our
belief in the ‘truthfulness’ and authenticity of the written text. At one
point, Nell’s diary explores a crisis in its own representation when she
ponders the power of words to express the intensity of emotion as com-
pared to the symbolic value of signs such as the mementos collected
in Susannah’s ‘black book’: the train ticket that was never used and
which memorializes the day their father died. ‘What were my words
after all?’, Nell writes, ‘For every leaf Susannah found and pasted, I’d
need to write pages upon pages – and still who would ever know who
we had been?’ (161). Ultimately, she concludes, ‘Nothing can represent
us – nothing satisfy’ (161). This is reconfirmed by Susannah at the close
of the text, in a statement which proclaims the illusionary character
of neo-Victorian fiction itself: ‘Nothing speaks correctly for the past.
Everything lies’ (372). Everything we know and write of the past is con-
structed, manipulated, invented, fabricated. What little remains of the
past we are unable to see with open, unbiased eyes: ‘They are gone. All
of them gone. And you, who are left, who look at me now, . . . hardly
see me. . . . You cannot see me, though you look. You see Susannah of
the diary . . . And then you see Cook of Grange House.’ When Maisie
replies that ‘There is a vast gap between’, Susannah responds: ‘There,
then. Look there in the gap. Look there – for me’ (372). This, then, is
the legacy of Blake’s novel: the gaps and contradictions between our
conceptualization of the Victorian and our construction of the neo-
Victorian open up the potential for developing a new vision.
1.3 ‘Tell me the truth’: Trauma, witnessing, and authorship

in Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006)19
It is precisely this critical ‘space between’, the discrepancy between

what we understand the past to be and the way we reconstruct it, with
which Margaret Lea, the frame narrator of The Thirteenth Tale, has to
grapple in her project of writing the official biography of the bestselling
novelist Vida Winter; an undertaking complicated by the fact that the

48 Neo-Victorianism
author is notorious for her extreme evasiveness, having invented a new

biography for every interviewer. While on previous occasions she had
used ‘[o]ffcuts from novels and stories, plots that never got finished,
stillborn characters, picturesque locations I never found a use for’ (6),
now, she insists, the time has come for her to respond to the appeal of

the awkward young local reporter who, forty years earlier, had implored
her to ‘tell him the truth’ (7). All truth claims notwithstanding, however,
everything relies on our ability to ‘look there in the gap’ and perceive
the figure in the crack. When Margaret finally begins to gain clarity of
insight,
the story Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every
event identical, in every detail the same – yet entirely, profoundly
different. Like those images that reveal a young bride if you hold the
picture one way, and an old crone if you hold it the other. Like the
sheets of random dots that disguise teapots[.] (349)
In contradistinction to Misfortune’s inkblots, which take shape only

after disaster has struck, Margaret’s new vision is recuperative, blow-
ing ‘life into the story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began
to mend’ (349). Like Susannah in Grange House, Vida Winter forged
a new personality out of the ashes of her old life, and like Nell the
proximity of death impels her to disclose and pass on her story, not so
that it may be written anew, but to ensure that it be written at all. The
attempt to write her story herself conjures up so many ghosts that it
can only be completed by her spiritual heir, Margaret, the author of a
number of biographical studies not of the great but of the forgotten.
Again the story of the past – here a past not set in a clearly definable
period20 –involves the fall of a house and the cataclysmic destruction
of three generations bound together, and devastated, by the deadly
intensity of sibling love. The searing force of this bond, literally
branded on the flesh, is the mark of trauma which Margaret shares
with Miss Winter, whose mutilated hand with its enigmatic stamp in
its palm (the imprimatur of the key to the library, which itself is key to
the story) acts as the counterpart of Margaret’s scarred torso, the birth
and death mark of her conjoined twin who died to give her life. Just
as it was Margaret’s essay on an historical pair of writer twins based on
the Goncourt brothers21 which prompted Miss Winter’s approach, so
Margaret’s initial reluctance is overcome when she witnesses the older
woman’s outburst of grief at the memory of her greatest loss, which
relates so closely to her own:

‘I lived at Angelfield . . . I was sixteen . . . There was a fire . . . I lost

everything. . . . Oh, Emmeline!’ . . . Now I knew I was tied to the
story. I had stumbled upon the heart of the tale that I had been
commissioned to tell. It was love. And loss. . . . I recognized the very
essence of her: how could I fail to, for was it not the essence of me?

We were both lone twins. (52–3)
Miss Winter’s fractured speech reflects the impact of traumatic memory,22

stirring similarly painful recollections in Margaret. In flight from the
human intimacy that all but destroyed them, both have embraced books
and writing as a strategy of survival: ‘a way of filling in the time since
everything finished’ (51) in the novelist’s case, a means of ‘tend[ing] the
graves of the dead’ in the antiquarian bookseller daughter’s (17). Books
are their primary frame of reference; even, as indicated in a (as later
transpires, not so) hypothetical dilemma Miss Winter sets Margaret at a
critical moment in the narrative, the arbiter of life and death: what would
Margaret do, she wants to know, if she witnessed the destruction of world
literature at the hands of a maniac and happened to have a shot-gun at
her disposal? While failing to respond in the situation, Margaret admits
in private to sharing Miss Winter’s murderous preference (241–2).
From their first encounter, even in advance of it, books orchestrate
the interaction between the two women. In preparation for her visit
Margaret familiarizes herself with some of Miss Winter’s best-known
novels (the titles of which engage the reader in a metafictional game
of detection and recognition, while the author’s name invokes the
duplicitous husband of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca).23 As she travels
up to Yorkshire, Margaret ponders the fact that she knows the region
exclusively through Victorian fiction. And it is Victorian fiction incar-
nate that she finds in Miss Winter’s library, the chosen location for their
appointments. Having arrived early for their first interview, Margaret
takes the opportunity to browse the shelves, which contain a quantity
of Gothic and Victorian novels: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Woman
in White, (Horace Walpole’s) Castle of Otranto, (Henry M. Milner’s melo-
drama) The Spectre Bride, Jekyll and Hyde. Clue and framing device in
one, these books provide a first indication of Miss Winter’s strategy of
hiding by showing. Jane Eyre will figure prominently as a founding text
in her narrative,24 and the other novels hint at central aspects of her
narrative performance-to-be: fatal attractions between (near) siblings,
swapped identities, Gothic illusion and misrecognition, ghostly com-
panions, dual personalities. When Margaret moves on to inspect Miss
Winter’s collection of her own works, and fails to spot a copy of her

50 Neo-Victorianism
most celebrated book, Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation (famous

for its missing titular tale), she suddenly becomes aware of an observer’s
presence. In parodic-dramatic adaptation of Miss Havisham’s mise-en-
scène of herself as an allegory of mourning and bride of death in her
first meeting with Pip in chapter 8 of Great Expectations, Miss Winter

presents herself
an ancient queen, sorceress or goddess. Her stiff figure rose regally

out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped around her
shoulders, the folds of turquoise and green cloth that cloaked her
body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair
had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twirls, curls and
coils. Her face, as intricately lined as a map, was powdered white
and finished with bold, scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were
a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her
nails, unvarnished, cut short and square like my own, struck an
incongruous note. (43)
With this extravagant display of Pre-Raphaelite, Gothic and vampiric

paradigms of the femme fatale blended with Dickensian markers of
age and decay, Miss Winter advertises the performativity of her act as
an illusionist. The woman herself remains inaccessible: if on publicity
posters she presents startlingly green eyes of ‘perfect inexpression’ (11),
which make Margaret wonder whether she has a soul, here she conceals
them altogether behind dark sunglasses (43). In the course of subse-
quent sessions, however, as she moves closer to the heart of her story,
her appearance changes dramatically: discarding her hyper-stylized
image, she allows her colour to grow out, abandons her false eyelashes,
omits all make-up, and finally asks Margaret to cut off her hair until
only the white scalp is left. These stages of naturalization bring about
a resurrection of bodily authenticity after a lifetime of impersonation.
Miss Winter’s gradual return to her ‘original’ self reflects a spiritual
cleansing process, which is accompanied by a change in narrative per-
spective, from omniscient to first-person narration, bestowing a voice
to the green-eyed girl that ‘was no more than a sub-plot’ (59) when she
was born, but who now holds the strings of the plot.
The first time this identity begins to emerge from the shadows is in
the ‘Middles’ section of Miss Winter’s dysfunctional family romance. In
response to Margaret’s insistence that she be given three verifiable facts
as a condition of her acceptance of employment – her real name
(Adeline March), place of birth, and a publicly recorded incident from

her early days (the fire at Angelfield) – Miss Winter imposed in her
turn her preferred narrative structure: Beginnings, Middles, Ends. This
claim to linearity of narration is of course as much a sleight of hand as
is her affirmation of truthfulness: ‘The truth had been there all along’,
Margaret later concedes, yet the ‘trick mirrors and the double bluffs’

(350) of its representation mean that ‘only now had I seen it’ (349).
Like the garden of Miss Winter’s estate, whose layout she is unable to
fathom, the appearance of straight lines serves to conceal the angles
(so reminiscent of the asymmetrical architecture and awkward angles
of Angelfield)25 without which the ‘true’ story cannot be unearthed:
‘Hedges that looked solid viewed straight on, sometimes revealed
a diagonal passageway when viewed obliquely. Shrubberies were easy to
wander into and near impossible to escape from. Fountains and statues
that I thought I had left behind me, reappeared’ (81).
The path to navigate through the maze of the garden – like the library a
central site of the family’s self-constitution and dissolution – lies through
the ‘understory’, to draw on Nell Grange’s concept in Blake’s novel: the
story underlying all the others, which here too is that of the sisters. ‘What
is it to have a sister?’, Ludlow asks Nell in Grange House, and receives
the reply, ‘A sister is one’s other half . . . she is at once who I am – and
am not . . . made visible’ (153). This is constitutive of Charlie’s sado-
masochistic relationship with and existential dependence on Isabelle in
the second Angelfield generation, and is key to the third-generation story
of the twins Emmeline and Angeline, officially the offspring of Isabelle’s
marriage to Roland March (who, like Dolly’s father in Misfortune, inverts
Victorian literary conventions by departing to the other world at the
birth of his daughters), more probably the product of incest (whether
brother or father-induced remains uncertain). Like his father’s, Charlie’s
mental condition and even life are determined by his compulsive obses-
sion with Isabelle: when she deserts them, George kills himself in the
library, dying of septicaemia caused by Isabelle’s torn hair seared into his
palm (a legacy visited differently on the third generation in Miss Winter’s
mark), whereas Charlie vents his frustration by raping village girls. Like
Geoffrey in Misfortune he retires to the nursery after Isabelle is lost to him,
having been committed to a lunatic asylum when the girls are in their
early teens, and at news of her death disappears to shoot himself in a
neglected part of the estate’s gardens.
Adeline and Emmeline take the previous generation’s sibling pat-
tern to extremes (the former absorbing all of Charlie’s sadistic ener-
gies and the latter all of Isabelle’s sensuality), while being even more
exclusively focused on one another and communicating primarily

52 Neo-Victorianism
(Emmeline) or exclusively (Adeline) in twin language. Hester Barrow,

the governess engaged by Doctor Maudsley (namesake to the Victorian
physician)26 to put the household in order and take charge of the moral
and mental development of the twins, recognizes their psychological
division along polar lines, with each displaying one set of emotions

and behaviours. In her ability to engage with others Emmeline is the
more manageable of the two, whereas Adeline represents pure aggres-
sion and an autistic disregard for anybody apart from her sister, her
wilful destruction of John’s topiary garden being a case in point. There
is, however, Hester has opportunity to observe, a repressed personality
within Adeline who is struggling to emerge: a ‘girl in the mist’ (180)
interested in her environment and responsive to learning. It is this girl
whom the scientifically-minded Hester, exceptionally well-read in
medical research on twins, proposes to set free. Yet the experiment of
physical separation that she instigates with Maudsley proves a consum-
mate failure: instead of developing a sense of independence, Adeline
‘was lost. Absent from herself. Without her sister, she was nothing and
she was no one. It was just the shell of a person they took to the doctor’s
house’ (184). Adeline is not the only casualty of the experiment: Hester
starts to fear for her own sanity when she observes Emmeline playing
with Adeline in the garden but minutes later discovers the latter safely
under lock and key in the doctor’s house. An unguarded kiss between
the scientists leads to Hester’s hasty departure, and the Angelfield
régime reverts to chaos and decay. With one significant alteration:
Hester’s intervention has awakened the ‘girl in the mist’ to action. It
is in the course of Hester’s exposition of her twin theory and her refer-
ence to Adeline’s dual personality that Miss Winter draws attention to
‘a little spy’ (168) eavesdropping on the conversation in the garden.
This ‘girl within’ now comes to life in the first person (172). It is she
who discovers Charlie’s body though she keeps the information to
herself. When the roof and ceilings of the house cave in, she consults,
and arranges for a transfer of funds from, the family lawyer, who is at
a loss to explain Angeline’s miraculous transformation.
As Margaret realizes in the course of reading Hester’s diary passed
on to her by Miss Winter, this is not Angeline at all: it is the third,
hitherto invisible sister, the figure in white (echoing Collins’s constel-
lation of sisters) who, by attacking Mrs Maudsley with a violin in the
library, prompted Isabelle’s commitment to an institution; the vil-
lage boy glimpsed by Hester working alongside John in the garden;
Emmeline’s playfellow during Angeline’s confinement; the ghostly
presence in the house who moved curtains and books, purloining

Hester’s diary; the ‘ghost reader’ Hester imagined ‘lean[ing] over my

shoulder watching my pen’ (346). ‘Child of rape. Charlie’s child’ (354),
she was abandoned in the garden by an unknown mother when she
was a toddler, and then adopted by John and Missus and given the
name ‘Shadow’. The ‘girl between’ Angeline and Emmeline, she pro-

tects Emmeline from Angeline’s jealous rages, but is unable to prevent
her spiralling violence, first towards John, who dies when his ladder is
tampered with, and finally, in the night of the fire, against Emmeline
herself. By then Emmeline is the mother of a child with John’s assist-
ant, Ambrose, who had been rejected by Shadow. Shadow intervenes
when Adeline, a raging Bertha Rochester, steals the baby from its cot
and attempts to set fire to it in the library, using Shadow’s favourite
Victorian novels to kindle the flames. Shadow rescues the child and
carries him to safety, leaving the bundle on the doorstep of a house on
the edges of the estate whose kindly middle-aged owner she had many
times observed through the windows. On her return, finding the twins
engaged in deadly combat, she pulls Emmeline out of the library and
locks the door shut against the other, burning her hand when turning
the key. It is only after regaining consciousness in the garden that she
realizes that the sister she saved is Adeline.
Like the death of Margaret’s twin, Emmeline’s releases Shadow into
life – a legal identity, a name, the right to an inheritance – while sen-
tencing her to permanent emotional purgatory for killing the woman
she loved, whom she had symbolically ‘married’ with Isabelle’s wedding
ring. As Shadow is known to the villagers and lawyer as ‘Adeline’, the
real Adeline becomes Emmeline, who roams Miss Winter’s garden at
night, digging the earth, looking for Emmeline, her only language
a singsong of inchoate sounds: a tamed Bertha housed in a separate
set of rooms; most definitely not the mother to whom Margaret mis-
takenly introduces Aurelius Love (the awkward young man who had
sought to find out the ‘truth’ from Miss Winter decades earlier). Having
befriended Aurelius on her reconnaissance trips to Angelfield ruin and
heard his account of Mrs Love’s story of his arrival on her doorstep the
night of the fire, Margaret has rightly identified him as the Angelfield
heir. As a result of his harrowing encounter with ‘Emmeline’, Aurelius
comes to terms with his mourning for his missing mother, arriving
at the same conclusion as Maisie does at the end of Grange House:
‘Running after my story, when I had Mrs Love all along. She loved me’
(394). His reconciliation with the idea of his fractured maternal origins
is accompanied by the discovery of the paternal line: Kate Proctor and
her children Tom and Emma, whom Margaret had also encountered

54 Neo-Victorianism
at Angelfield, are the direct descendants of Ambrose Proctor, the man

who fathered Emmeline’s child; in Kate and her children Aurelius has
found a family. As in the previous novels discussed in this chapter, a
child originally buried is resurrected, a family and inheritance believed
lost are recovered.

Recovery of a different sort is achieved by Miss Winter and Margaret
who, able for the first time to talk about and share their pain, release the
pent-up sorrow of a lifetime. Setterfield here draws on Dori Laub’s con-
cept of working through trauma by ‘bearing witness’: because extreme
psychic shock ‘precludes its registration’ at the moment of impact,
it is only in narrating the experience, and ‘being listened to – and
heard’, that ‘the cognizance, the “knowing” of the event is given birth
to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo.
The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak,
the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first
time.’27 Consequently, Miss Winter’s paroxysm of ‘fossilized’ tears (275)
over the death of John, the closest to a father she had known, sixty
years after the event, is complemented by Margaret’s grieving for her
sister, herself, her clinically depressed mother. This process of mourning
completes the story, enabling Miss Winter to die reconciled with her life,
while constituting a rebirth for Margaret: birth without guilt.
The final section of the novel, the second period of ‘Beginnings’,
offers renewal as well as closure, in the style of George Eliot’s ‘Finale’ to
Middlemarch (with which The Thirteenth Tale shares its web metaphor):
‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.’28 Miss Winter is dead,
Angelfield demolished; but her Yorkshire home, recast as a museum
and tourist site, will continue to be looked after by that reincarna-
tion of Angelfield’s benign Missus and John, the housekeeper Judith
and taciturn gardener Maurice. Miss Winter’s dual legacy, her life
story and its reconfiguration into art, her incomplete ‘thirteenth tale’,
‘Cinderella’s Child’ (the story of her conception and abandonment),
are now Margaret’s, who decides to publish the story but to lodge the
manuscript of her biography with Miss Winter’s lawyer until Tom and
Emma have reached maturity. Having embraced life, Margaret is offered
the opportunity of a love relationship with Dr Clifton, Miss Winter’s
physician: a contemporary version of the Hester Barrow/Dr Maudsley
partnership. Clifton had previously prescribed a dose of Sherlock Holmes
to counteract the effect on Margaret of too rich a diet of the Brontë
sisters and Collins’s sensation fiction. In sharp contrast to Winter’s
Thirteen Tales, where ‘[e]very Happy Ever After was tainted’ (27), all the
strands are reconnected, all fractures healed. Here the novel performs

the nostalgic return to an imaginary paradigm that Christian Gutleben

considers constitutive of the neo-Victorian genre, offering us a ‘meta-
romance which plays with the reader’s romantic longings’ and fulfils
them by providing the happy ending29 which the Victorian novel so
often eschewed with its highly ambiguous dénouements: Jane Eyre’s

closure on the outsider figure, St John; Villette’s resistance to reader
expectations of a reunion of the lovers, Great Expectations’ two endings;
Middlemarch’s tribute to the countless ‘hidden li[ves] . . . rest[ing] in
unvisited tombs’,30 unrecognized, unwritten, forgotten; The Turn of the
Screw’s notorious instability of meaning.
1.4 ‘There was something unheimlich about it’:

Familial/textual legacies and spectral returns in
John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004)31
The readerly desire for (meta)romance, so frequently frustrated in Victorian

and satisfied in neo-Victorian fiction, is rendered uncanny in The Ghost
Writer, a novel whose textual reconstructions of the Victorian Gothic
and in particular the (Jamesian)32 ghost story explore instability themati-
cally, through the collapse of personal and family relationships, within
a structure which performs instability generically through an extraordi-
narily carefully crafted web of inter/intratextual references. The story of
mourning and a lost inheritance – the Australian Gerard Hugh Freeman’s
quest for his permanently traumatized mother’s and his family’s past in
England – is embedded within a patchwork of stories which display the
‘brutal and sharp and heartbreaking’ quality of Vida Winter’s Thirteen
Tales.33 In contradistinction to the novels discussed so far, there are no
happy endings anywhere, either for the first-person narrator or for the
protagonists of his great-grandmother’s tales. Gerard comes into his inher-
itance only by losing it for ever, just as he himself came into existence
only as a result of his mother losing hers.
This originary loss is figured pictorially and textually in the form of
the photograph of a young woman, unknown yet strangely familiar,
and a fin-de-siècle magazine story that the young boy comes across in
his mother’s bedroom; and it is her extreme reaction which in turn
compels his search for meaning: ‘My mother stood rigid, fists clenched,
nostrils flared. Tufts of hair stuck out from her head; the whites of her
eyes seemed to be spilling out of their sockets’ (5). The horror embod-
ied by the material reminders of Phyllis’s family – the picture, Gerard
will later discover, is of her sister Anne, the story by her grandmother
Viola Hatherley – invoke the traumatic as the spectral: petrified by the

56 Neo-Victorianism
ghost of the past, Phyllis is unable to release herself from its shadow.
She never destroys what so markedly terrifies her, nor is she ever able
to speak about it; she even withholds the vital information that she
had a sister. Just as in The Thirteenth Tale Vida Winter writes novels
to keep agonizing memories at bay, so Gerard’s mother fictionalizes

a past she can bear neither to forget nor to remember, purloining her
grandmother’s stories in her reminiscences about the picturesque coun-
try house Staplefield, where she grew up with her best friend Rosalind.
As Gerard discovers two decades later, this was a fictive memory, drawn
from Viola’s ‘The Pavilion’, the friend in the tale who helps the pro-
tagonist avoid an unhappy marriage replacing the factual sister who
attempted to murder her. The real Staplefield is a Hampstead house, in
Ferrier’s Close, where at the climax of the novel Gerard will encounter
his mother’s ghosts. The invented memory assumes authenticity status
in the child’s mind, turning into the nostalgic signifier of a lost paradise:
‘my memories, as they truly seemed, . . . became my principal refuge’
from the bleakness of Mawson, formerly ‘Leichhardt’ (‘stiff corpse’),
in the dead heart of Australia (15): an emotional desert, the site of
buried dreams and of his émigré parents’ death-in-life existence. His
mother’s obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder is complemented
by his father’s silent withdrawal to a toy world of automated trains
without humans to complicate the mechanism and, shortly before
Gerard’s eighteenth birthday, his death proper. When, exasperated by
the young adult’s insistence to probe her about the past, Phyllis claims
that Staplefield burned to the ground (an image which anticipates the
ending), Gerard finds himself locked into a grieving process (72) for the
loss of his imaginary home.
Gerard’s nostalgia for Staplefield is replaced, and rekindled, with the
beginning, in early puberty, of a pen-pal relationship with Alice Jessell,
whose orphaned and wheel-bound condition following a car accident
with fatal consequences for her parents mirrors his own sense of parental
abandonment and physical entrapment. This ‘invisible friend’ (15), a ver-
itable Alice in Wonderland (rural England), resident in an institutional
home uncannily familiar, whose ‘view from [the] window reminded me
constantly of the landscape my mother used to describe’ (23), comes to
stand for Staplefield also in her material inaccessibility and her disloca-
tion to the realm of dreams and epistolary ‘word-pictures’ (25): just like
his mother with the family home, so now Alice conjures up desires which
remain forever unfulfilled. While, in looks and destiny, she constructs
herself as a Lady of Shalott figure, it is Gerard who is condemned to
leading the lady’s mirror existence, as he progressively isolates himself in

order to spend all his time on weaving his inner life and longings into
the tapestry of his letters. Fulfilment only comes in a dream (29), which
prompts a second dream, a memory of himself as a small child with his
mother reading to him, crying (30).
His unconscious thus having connected together Alice, his mother,

and reading in a memory of the past, he re-explores his mother’s room
and finds the story he had come across before: ‘Seraphina’, published in
The Chameleon (a journal inspired by the Yellow Book and The Savoy)
in 1898.34 The story bears disconcerting resemblance to his always
curtailed desire for Alice, who will not hear of phone calls or a visit
and refuses even to send a picture. Like the mysterious Pre-Raphaelite
seductress featured on the ingenious painting which instantly fills Lord
Edmund Napier with an intense passion for her possession, ‘she was
the woman he had so long sought’ (41), but who eludes any attempt
to claim her: every time Edmund steps close to the picture, it dissolves
into ‘unintelligible swirls and textures of pigment’ (41) – another
version of Misfortune’s fatal inkblots – only to be reborn into tanta-
lizing beauty the moment he moves away. In his ever more frenzied
endeavour to capture the dream, Edmund becomes a recluse and ends
by committing suicide under the hallucination of entering the frame
of the picture finally to embrace the object of his desire. The next day
he is found drowned, having jumped off the bridge from which his
former abandoned and pregnant lover plunged to her death. The pic-
ture now depicts nothing but clouds and fog, with the faintest outline
of a woman’s smile barely perceptible in the upper corner. Edmund’s
grand passion was never anything more than a grand illusion.
While Gerard is unnerved – ‘Seraphina’s resemblance to Alice . . .
troubled me’ (74) – he is unable to resist Alice’s textual seduction and
becomes her lover by ‘directed dreaming’ (58), shared fantasies of sexual
union. Eight years into their epistolary relationship, at the age of 21,
he revisits Lord Edmund’s emotionally devastating experience when he
travels to London in feverish anticipation of their first actual meeting,
to find not a trace of her: neither letters, nor an address, or a phone
number, not even a record of her birth. Like the past to his mother,
Alice assumes a disturbing spectral quality, an impression intensified
by The Turn of the Screw, which he now reads for the first time, recog-
nizing Alice’s surname as that of the ghostly apparition of the fallen
governess with paedophile desires: ‘I wouldn’t be able to look at her
without thinking of Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel with her dead white face
and long black dress’ (75). If it is through acts of writing that Alice
was able to establish and construct herself in his imagination, Gerard’s

58 Neo-Victorianism
reading brings to life terrifying counter-images. Unable to track Alice

down, he consults the British Library Reading Room for The Chameleon
and finds a second 1898 story by Viola Hatherley, ‘The Gift of Flight’.
More disturbing than ‘Seraphina’, this proto-Freudian tale of the
uncanny again correlates with his own experiences. Set in the Reading

Room of the British Museum, it presents a strange mirror image of his
situation; some of his fellow-readers, a wild-eyed man, a veiled lady who
watches him obtrusively, appear to have sprung from the story, whose
themes offer ghostly, and ghastly, variations on his very anxieties: an
‘ideal’ lover who proves unreliable, the spectre of the past haunting
the present, the frightening dissolution of the boundaries between
textuality and reality.
In the story Julia Lockhart, unhappily married with a small daughter,
is grieving for the end of her adulterous relationship with the journalist
and poet Frederick Liddell (whose name recalls the real-life model for
Lewis Carroll’s character, Alice Liddell, thus linking Julia’s and Gerard’s
defective lovers). Frederick is unable to release himself from the spell
of his deceased ex-lover, the dancer Lydia Lopez, who died from an
accident on the high wire. Lydia’s ominous presence pervades his attic
flat, inducing a dangerous fit of vertigo in Julia, who feels drawn to
throwing herself off the balcony. She visits the British Museum hop-
ing to find ‘one particular book which would speak directly to her
sorrow. It would be like finding a new friend, one whose perceptions
were so subtly and delicately attuned to hers as to see further into her
heart than she herself was capable of doing’ (80–1); the analogies with
Gerard’s own particular friend who exists only in and through writing
are manifest. As if in compliance with her wish, a book is delivered to
Julia whose bizarre sequence of events is set in motion as soon as she
leaves the library. When she returns to the British Museum to recover
the clairvoyant book, she finds herself stalked by a terrifying doll child
and, in order to escape its deadly grasp, almost precipitates herself over
the railings of the gallery. A second attempt at locating the mysterious
book leads to her discovery of an account of Frederick’s death with that
very day’s date. Desperate to avert a calamity, she hastens to his flat
and finds him dazed, evidently in the act of conjuring up Lydia’s ghost;
she is attacked by the doll child, a reincarnation of the dead woman,
but struggles free and disposes of the doll via the balcony. The spell is
broken; in more ways than one. Julia realizes that her dream of flight
with Frederick as the ideal companion was an illusion; ‘She left him
dreaming of the dead, and went wearily down the stairs to rejoin the
living’ (112).

As with ‘Seraphina’, Gerard is struck by the analogies with his own

life, and cannot shake off a sequence of nightmares in which the doll
child and an indistinguishable figure in flight whom he takes to be Alice
merge into one. While he identifies with Julia, he is not ready to follow
her example and ‘rejoin the living’, for ‘Without Alice . . . Staplefield

was dead and gone’ (114). Alice and the past are inextricably inter-
twined; he cannot renounce either, and remains trapped in Frederick’s
victim position. On his return to Australia Alice resumes contact to
explain that during his London visit she was undergoing surgery, and
that, if her medical diagnosis is correct, they will soon be able to meet
in the flesh. In actual fact it will take another thirteen years for Gerard,
finally, to encounter her, in circumstances which will turn him into the
petrified image his mother presented at the start of his quest.
Like Julia’s extraordinary reading matter in the British Museum, Viola
Hatherley’s stories hold clairvoyant powers whose influence appears
potent even a hundred years on; indeed, what little Gerard’s mother
was prepared to tell him of her past is that ‘one [of Viola’s stories] came
true’ (122). This is the 1925 typescript of ‘The Revenant’, which Gerard
discovers in his mid-thirties, after his mother’s death, together with two
photographs, a radiant picture of herself with baby Gerard, the other
the picture of the mysterious, beautiful woman he had come across as
a child, hidden in the top cupboard over her bed. Phyllis fell off her
footstool when attempting to retrieve and destroy the folder. If this is
‘the story my mother had died trying to keep me from reading’ (129), it
is also quite literally the story she almost died for as a result of reading.
The story and the photographs of herself and her sister represent the
equivalent of a trauma mark, always concealed yet forever present, even
their hiding place an invocation of the past (the top cupboard of her
original bedroom in Ferrier’s Close holds the secret to her story and that
of ‘The Revenant’).
‘The Revenant’ takes up aspects of the earlier tales – the hypnotic and
supernatural qualities of a painting, the revenge of the dead – and inter-
weaves them with the story of sibling rivalry and family breakdown. The
tale is set in an English country estate, Ashbourn House (another ver-
sion of Staplefield or Ferrier’s Close), and recounts the fatal influence of
Imogen de Vere’s tragic love story on the third generation, her orphaned
granddaughters Cordelia and Beatrice, who live with their uncle and
aunt. Imogen had a terrible punishment exacted on her by her brutal
husband Ruthven for her adulterous relationship with the painter Henry
St Clair. While her face was disfigured by the mysterious, debilitating
illness that afflicted her after spending a fatal last night in her husband’s

60 Neo-Victorianism
house, St Clair was ruined when Ruthven seized all his paintings,
including the portrait of his wife. Rather than destroying the painter’s
work, Ruthven (like Edmund in ‘Seraphina’) succumbs to its ghostly
allure, and in order to pass on the curse makes the maintenance of the
collection central to his bequest to the descendants of his wife. When

Cordelia comes into her maturity, she is told the terms of the legacy, and
promptly falls in love with the solicitor’s clerk, Harry Beauchamp, who
visits to examine the collection. Harry is, however, more struck with
St Clair’s pictures, in particular what he calls his ‘exorcisms’ (178), the
sinister antithesis to Imogen’s portrait and his lyric landscape paintings.
If Cordelia is drawn to Imogen’s picture as a source of inspiration and
comfort, the focus of Harry’s increasingly unhealthy obsession is ‘The
Drowned Man’, a series of interlocking panels which, opened up, reveal a
drowned corpse’s face, ‘life-size, teeth bared, eyes wide open and staring’
(184), a face which changes age depending on the proximity or distance
of the observer (another echo of ‘Seraphina’), an object of abjection.
Harry comments that ‘it’s like being reminded of something, and not
being able to remember what it reminds you of’ (196): a vision of death’s
shadow presence in every living body. Exploring the room, Cordelia dis-
covers a strange contraption somehow connected to Imogen’s fate since
the green Pre-Raphaelite gown featured in St Clair’s portrait is folded up
in the box which contains the apparatus. In the meantime Beatrice, who
nurtures a long-standing resentment against Cordelia, takes up work
in London. After much prompting Harry proposes to Cordelia, but she
soon has cause for jealousy, and the story – the final sections of which
Gerard recovers in Ferrier’s Close – ends with her bursting in on a sexual
assignment between Harry and Beatrice in the attic studio which houses
St Clair’s paintings.
As Gerard learns from Abigail Hamish’s letter (the old lady who
responds to his search for information on Phyllis Hatherley) and from
his personal investigation of Ferrier’s Close, where he comes across let-
ters and diary entries by Viola and Anne, the story of the real-life sisters
Anne and Phyllis replicated central parts of ‘The Revenant’. Anne, in
rereading their grandmother’s story, feels unnerved by the correspond-
ences in the family constellation: ‘I’ve never thought of Filly and me as
estranged, just not terribly close. But now I wonder. Just as it didn’t seem
odd, before, that she and I haven’t talked about our parents for years,
and now it does’ (307–8). As in Viola’s tale, the sisters are orphans, their
parents (like Alice’s) having died in a car crash, and live with relatives,
their grandmother and after her death their spiritualist aunt Iris. At the
time of the crisis, 1949 (the date on the back of Anne’s picture), Phyllis

studies typing and shorthand in London, while Anne is looking after the
ailing Iris. In the process of having family paintings evaluated for a sale
to boost their depleted finances, Anne becomes engaged to the agent’s
representative, Hugh Montfort.35 Now that yet another jigsaw of the
story has fallen into place, she feels under a strange compulsion to read

everything that happens in the context of ‘The Revenant’. Her attraction
to Hugh is as much over-determined by her conviction that the story is
repeating itself as is her jealousy of her sister, who ‘behaved exactly like
Beatrice’ (311) on being introduced to her fiancé; in her diary she even
starts mixing up their names. Despite frantic vows – ‘I just mustn’t think
about it any more. . . . I’ve locked the story in the study. I will never read
it or think of it again. . . . I must not think about it any more . . . I will not
read the story again’ (312–14) – she is compelled to return to it always.
In her obsession with ‘The Revenant’ Anne mirrors Harry Beauchamp’s
fixation with the ‘Drowned Man’, for which she now scours the house,
ostensibly to ‘prove it doesn’t exist’ (312), more probably because she is
certain it does. Ultimately ‘The Revenant’ comes true because of the way
in which it is overread by Anne, who initially wonders whether ‘the
story [is] making me see things that aren’t there’ (308); it comes true
further because of the conjunction of Anne’s hysterical and Phyllis’s
performative reading practices. For, having read Anne’s diary, Phyllis
decides to act out ‘The Revenant’. When Anne discovers her in the attic
room in bed with Hugh, ‘she threw back her head and looked straight
at me’ (315) in a metadramatic gesture which provokes Anne to take the
story to its extreme conclusion. Iris, who knows about Phyllis’s but not
Anne’s treacherous actions, changes her will, disinheriting Phyllis and
leaving everything to Anne. According to Miss Hamish Anne then mys-
teriously disappeared: Gerard is convinced that she became the victim of
murder at the hand of his mother.
The real story emerges from a sequence of terrifying Gothic encounters
which Gerard must negotiate in Ferrier’s Close: messages from Iris’s Ouija
board which incriminate Phyllis, the hallucination or apparition of a
spectral figure while he lies asleep on the living-room couch, whisper-
ings from the gallery of the library, a near-fatal entrapment in the cellar
(where Gerard believes Anne was murdered after finding a missing section
of ‘The Revenant’ with a handwritten message by her), all culminating
in the apocalyptic confrontation with the past that his entire life has
been straining towards. Having recognized the anagram in ‘A.V. Hamish’
and the fact that Abigail Victoria Hamish and Anne Victoria Hatherley
share the same initials, Gerard mounts the stairs to the attic studio of the
house he has set on fire in his desperate attempt to force open the cellar

62 Neo-Victorianism
door. There, in the studio featured in the climax of ‘The Revenant’ and so
critical also to his mother’s story, he comes face to face with a spectacular
version of Miss Havisham, a ghastly parody of the Pre-Raphaelite maiden
as a harbinger of death and decay:

an indistinct figure shrouded in flowing white . . . glided to the
door . . . I saw that she was tall and statuesque and veiled like a bride;
a long white veil, floating above a great cascading cloud of chestnut
hair that flowed on down over her shoulders exactly as it had in so
many dreams of Alice. Her arms were entirely concealed by long
white gloves, and her gown, too, was white, gathered high at the
waist. . . . ‘My questing knight,’ she whispered. ‘Now you can claim
your prize.’ . . .
The veil floated free; the cloud of chestnut hair skipped from her
shoulders and fell at her feet with a soft thud. Lamplight gleamed upon
a bald, mummified head, skin stretched like crackling over the dome of
the skull, with two black holes for nostrils and a single eye burning in
a leprous mass of tissue, fixing me, half a life too late, with the enor-
mity of my delusion as I saw that Alice Jessell and Anne Hatherley and
Abigail Hamish were one and the same person . . . (366–7, 372)
In a frenzied impulse towards punishing her sister and completing the

cycle of repetition, Anne fell victim to her own murderous scheme.
Having understood her grandmother’s references to Imogen de Vere’s
mysterious illness, she knows that it originated from the strange
apparatus Cordelia found in the studio because this apparatus, an
early Roentgen machine, was in the possession of Viola’s scientifically-
minded husband Alfred. It is with this fluoroscope that Anne plotted
the ultimate revenge when she moved the machine into the top cup-
board over Phyllis’s bed, connecting it to her bedside lamp: every time
the lamp was switched on, the deadly rays would be directed towards
Phyllis. While she was aware that the radiation would fall out on both
sides of the partition, thus also endangering her in the adjoining bed-
room, she did not realize that Phyllis’s bulb was blown. On the night
of the betrayal Phyllis slept in the studio room, and Anne went to bed
thinking she was ‘safe’ (371), not realizing that the machine was in
fact switched on, thus inflicting on herself the horrific radiation burns
meant for her sister. Terrified, Phyllis fled the scene, giving birth to
a son, the first Gerard Hugh, who lived for only a few months: ‘My half-
brother, you could say, except that I had only been born because he had
died’ (336). Hugh Montfort, Anne implies, suffered an ‘accident’ (371),

having presumably been done away with in the cellar where she locked
up Gerard, or pushed down the stairs as Harry is by Beatrice in ‘The
Revenant’. Having imparted to Gerard his legacy of death and destruc-
tion, Anne, an Erinye of sisterhood, descends into the blazing library,
while Gerard escapes out of the French windows of the burning house

that once was the Staplefield of his imagination.
That Miss Havisham/Miss Jessel/Alice in Wonderland exits through the
library, there to be consumed by the flames which will also obliterate
the literary legacy that has scripted into existence the family drama and
trauma of which Gerard is the sole survivor, is a reminder of the prima-
rily textual constructions to which his identity and affective universe
have been subject. The instability of this textual inheritance is signalled
by the prevailing mode of the uncanny, which shapes Gerard’s experi-
ence and Viola Hatherley’s stories alike: both are haunted by doubles
(Alice and Seraphina, Gerard and Frederick, Cordelia/Anne and Beatrice/
Phyllis, Harry Beauchamp and Hugh Montfort, Harry Beauchamp and
Alfred Hatherley), odd coincidences (clairvoyancy in ‘The Gift of
Flight’, the sibling relationship in ‘The Revenant’ and the Hatherley
family), and automata (the doll child, Miss Havisham). The conjunc-
tion of the ‘oddly familiar’ (246) and the strange (‘heimlich’ in its dual
meaning of ‘homely’/familiar and ‘secret’ conjuring up the category of
the ‘unheimlich’), which in his seminal article of 1919 Freud defined
as constitutive of the uncanny,36 is the ghost that stalks Gerard from
the outset, culminating in his ‘elusive sense of recognition’ (253) at
Ferrier’s Close. ‘[T]here was something unheimlich about it’, Viola writes
with reference to her literary clairvoyancy: ‘I felt that some sort of prog-
nostic gift had been thrust upon me, and I didn’t like it’ (294–5). The
recuperative potential of such a gift is explored in ‘The Pavilion’, whose
protagonist finds the courage to disentangle herself from an uncon-
genial marriage by visualizing it within the Gothic framework of the
vampire story. By contrast, Viola’s tale of family collapse, originating as
it does from her profound disquiet about her husband’s preoccupation
with his fluoroscope, her sense of having ‘married a stranger’ (294),
have the effect of conjuring up what they seek to pacify: an extreme
estrangement.
1.5 Conclusion
This condition of estrangement which haunts the neo-Victorian novel

offers an apt reflection on the instabilities of our contemporary relation-
ship to the Victorian past, a past deceptively familiar to us through its

64 Neo-Victorianism
literature, art, architecture, socio-cultural and political discourses, yet

always ultimately intangible, and utterly remote from our experience.
In exploring the uncanny aspects of fictional characters’ compulsion to
return to their roots in their endeavour at self-definition, neo-Victorianism
draws our attention to the conflicted nature of our engagement with our

own literary and cultural histories, involving us in imaginary dialogues
across the centuries. It is no coincidence that of the four texts discussed
in this chapter, two are set in our time looking back, while the other two
are looking forward from a nineteenth-century vantage point and, by
having the protagonists address their heirs, also apostrophize the reader.
In their focus on painful reminiscences as the foundation of contemporary
identities, these novels move beyond the nostalgic excesses of popular
neo-Victorianism’s investment in costume drama and bedroom plots to
examine the role of cultural memory to our twenty-first-century sense
of (literary) self.
Memory, as Jacques Le Goff observed at the start of the postmoder-
nist period, ‘is an essential element of . . . individual or collective
identity, the feverish and anxious quest for which is today one of the
fundamental activities of individuals and societies.’37 Significantly, it
was the later nineteenth century which saw the beginnings of modern
memory research (by Pierre Janet, William James, Freud, Henri Bergson)
and investigations into cerebral, subconscious, and traumatic processes
of recollection, which highlighted the catalytic impact these had on
literature and art.38 By mapping the cultural memory traces which
shape their protagonists’ lives and afford cathartic relief in traumatic
crises, neo-Victorian novels like Misfortune relate contemporary-as-
nineteenth-century gender dysphoria not back to the later Victorian era
of sexological enquiry,39 but to earlier traditions from classical to (early)
modern literature, problematizing historical continuities. Traumatic
experience, Cathy Caruth argues, is often related to a sense of
belatedness that expresses itself through geographical and temporal
distance: ‘since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it
is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another
time.’40 This other place and other time is pinpointed in all of the texts,
from Misfortune’s Greek and Roman antiquity in Turkey to the origins
of Grange House’s family drama in the Irish Famine. In The Thirteenth
Tale Margaret comes to accept and is able to work through her anguish
only by listening to Vida Winter recalling hers. The Ghost Writer propels
the hero into a painful recognition of the past by effecting a complex
synthesis between family quest story, Victorian literary pastiche, and
Gothic trauma narrative.

Why does the neo-Victorian novel so consistently retrace Freud’s

dysfunctional family romance? That, as Setterfield puts it, ‘it is dys-
function that makes a story’41 is richly illustrated in Victorian fiction,
which revolves around flawed, fractured, dissolving, newly emerging
(usually no less dysphoric) families: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Great

Expectations, The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw. The key figure,
who once brought the family into being, the mother, is identified
by her absence, and is often replaced by a defective surrogate (Miss
Havisham or, in her younger configuration, a madwoman or homicidal
governess). Condemned to the shadows or an early grave in nineteenth-
century literature, the mother is, however, of crucial importance to
the neo-Victorian genre, where she is frequently complemented by a
sister figure: here, the mother (or mother-and-sister pair) is the mark of
trauma, literarily represented as the Urtext which, if recovered and read
correctly, is able to furnish a resolution to the protagonist’s predicament.
The mother and the maternal home, acting as they do as sites of both
alienation and ultimate reconciliation, constitute central metaphors of
the legacy of Victorianism in neo-Victorian fiction. The Victorian family
mansion fulfils this function also in the ‘new’ neo-forties genre repre-
sented by Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) and, most recently,
Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009), texts (and homes) both haunted
by spectral mothers (in Waters’s case by the narrator’s memory of his
deceased mother, a former nursery-maid, and his desire to take control
of the house in which she worked in a quasi-maternal capacity, destroy-
ing the rightful owners in order to repossess her). The ancestral home,
in contemporary historical fiction, thus assumes the function of Woolf’s
lighthouse. As Suzanne Nalbantian remarks, the lighthouse is ‘the visual
focus which provokes the memory by way of conceptual association.
For the artist, the lighthouse as an object and place incites the memory
process.’42 What the lighthouse was to modernist fiction, the Victorian
ancestral home, firmly possessed by the spirit of a matriarch and writer
figure, is to the contemporary neo-Victorian imagination.

2
Race and Empire: Postcolonial
Neo-Victorians

Hybridity is . . . the strategic reversal of the process of
domination through disavowal (that is, the produc-
tion of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’
and original identity of authority). . . . [T]he colonial
hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space
where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire,
making its objects at once disciplinary and dissemi-
natory . . . a negative transparency. If discriminatory
effects enable the authorities to keep an eye on them,
their proliferating difference evades that eye . . . Those
discriminated against may be instantly recognized,
but they also force a recognition of the immediacy
and articulacy of authority – a disturbing effect that is
familiar in the repeated hesitancy afflicting the coloni-
alist discourse when it contemplates its discriminated
subjects: the inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeak-
able rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the
Hottentots. . . . [Hybridity] reveals the ambivalence at
the source of traditional discourses on authority and
enables a form of subversion[.]
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ (1985)1
Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject,

the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. . . .
[B]oth as object of colonialist historiography and as
subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of
gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of
colonial production, the subaltern has no history and
66

Race and Empire 67
cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more

deeply in shadow.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’ (1987)2

Appeals to the past are among the commonest strate-
gies in interpretations of the present. What animates
such appeals is not only disagreement about what
happened in the past and what the past was, but
uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over
and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in differ-
ent forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of
discussions – about influence, about blame and judge-
ment, about present actualities and future priorities . . .
Past and present inform each other, each implies the
other and, in the . . . ideal sense intended by [T. S.] Eliot,
each co-exists with the other. . . . [H]ow we formulate or
represent the past shapes our understanding and views
of the present.
Edward W. Said, Culture & Imperialism (1993)3
In the previous chapter we focused on the complex structures of

memory and mourning in the neo-Victorian family romance as meta-
phorically configured in the image of a haunted and haunting mansion.
This chapter is again concerned with traumatic experiences, but here we
examine the ‘house’, and heritage, of colonialism and the British Empire,
and closely related to this, Victorian Orientalism and constructions of
subalternity. As Edward Said pointed out in Culture & Imperialism, the
Victorian novel had a central investment in sustaining the imperial
project even as it marginalized the colonial worlds to which it dispatched
its protagonists (St John Rivers in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jem and Mary in
Gaskell’s Mary Barton), or from which they derived a sudden influx of
wealth, resulting in a startling change of fortune (Jane via her uncle in
Brontë’s novel; Pip via Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations). This
peripheral representation of the Empire and its peoples, whose exploi-
tation or subjection was yet so intricately connected with the fates of
the hero/ine, became the site of contestation in one of the earliest neo-
Victorian novels, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which conferred
subjectivity, speech and ‘a life’ on what Rhys called the ‘poor ghost’ of
Brontë’ s Creole madwoman.4 What is surprising in light of the direction
Rhys’s novel gave to the genre is that, apart from J.G. Farrell’s The Siege

68 Neo-Victorianism
of Krishnapur (1973), Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows (1976), and the
emergence of the American neo-slave narrative5 (a genre inaugurated
in 1966 by Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and epitomized in 1987 by Toni
Morrison’s Nobel Prize winning Beloved ),6 only the last fifteen years have
begun to see a rise in postcolonial narrative approaches to the nine-

teenth century: Jane Rogers’s Promised Lands (1995), Peter Carey’s Jack
Maggs (1997), Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), Matthew
Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner (2002),
Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003), Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (2005),
Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2007),
and Iliya Troyanov’s The Collector of Worlds (2008). The Orientalist pitfalls
for neo-Victorianism of the less serious kind are explored humorously in
Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire (2003), which mocks the fashion-
able taste for historical fiction set in exotic surroundings in the figure of
the nineteenth-century hack novelist Stapleton, a male version of the
bestselling writer Marie Corelli, who produces a ‘staple’ diet of potboilers
about colourful foreign locations in their imagined past glory:
Zoe. It’s a romance of old Byzantium . . . Jolly interesting – the subject,

I mean, not the novel . . . Uggdryth . . . a romance of life among the
Vikings. I meant to get them to invade Britain . . . Dun Eggs. Medieval
China . . . Very pretty – willow trees and pug dogs and the girl threw
herself into a brook. And before that . . . Abyssinia . . . A romance . . .
[a]mong the early Christians . . . All out of books, you know . . . it was
all out of three pages of Gibbon, and the rest . . . I made it all up . . .
Invented. The whole caboodle, anthropophagy, sacred tigers, ritual
dances with cowcumbers, all of it. Did very well, so my bookseller
assures me. All out of my noodle.7
If, as Marie-Luise Kohlke reminds us, ‘the Victorian age that once imag-
ined the Orient as seductive free zone of libidinous excess’ has now
itself become orientalized as ‘Western culture’s mysterious, eroticised,
and exotic Other’,8 postcolonial neo-Victorianism has to negotiate, and
resist, a twofold drive for Orientalism in the popular imagination.
This chapter examines a series of recent postcolonial encounters with the
neo-Victorian across a range of geographical and temporal locations: 1838
India just prior to the first Opium War (1839–42) in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of
Poppies (2008); Jamaica and the immediate post-slavery period (1838–40) in
Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008); 1860s Egypt in Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress
of Nothing (2009), and late-nineteenth to early twentieth-century juxta-
posed with millennial Egypt in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (shortlisted

Race and Empire 69
for the Booker Prize in 1999). While Pullinger explores colonial paradigms
through the lens of class, Ghosh, Fish, and Soueif scrutinize Victorian
attitudes to race and empire through the shared themes of racial violence
and slavery, sanctioned and maintained by the imperialist imperatives
of Christian religion and the politics of colonial occupation and judicial

oppression (the corruption of the courts is central to Sea of Poppies and
Map of Love and features also in Strange Music). The voices of resistance are
represented linguistically through hybrid and experimental languages,
and generically through patterns of fusion and disruption: the epistolary,
diary and first-person novel is broken up by omniscient narration (Strange
Music, Map of Love, Mistress of Nothing); the Victorian Bildungsroman is
complemented by Indian and Egyptian mythologies (Sea of Poppies,
Map of Love, Mistress of Nothing); the realist narrative is injected with the
uncanny and transformed into magic realism (Sea of Poppies, Isabel’s visit
to the mosque in Map of Love, Elizabeth’s visions in Strange Music).
These novels, we argue, illustrate postcolonial neo-Victorianism’s
creative challenge to the critical theory concepts of hybridity and the
silence of the subaltern. In her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
(1987) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak defined the subaltern as the indi-
genous rural subject silenced by both imperial and local discourses and
structures of power, arguing that the female subaltern – epitomized by
the Hindu widow’s self-immolation – ultimately always remains unrep-
resentable and ‘cannot be heard or read’.9 In focusing our attention
on the voices of female West Indian slaves, indentured workers, and
convicts, on the apotheosis as the founding mother of a new commu-
nity of a rural widow snatched by her lower-caste lover from the funeral
pyre, on the dialogues between Egyptian intellectuals and villagers, and
on the linguistic versatility of servants, these novels contest the ideas
both that the dispossessed are of necessity voiceless, and that silence,
where it does exist, must invariably reflect disempowerment (Ghosh’s
near-mute giant Kalua is a potent counter-example of the latter, as is Ada
McGrath, the Scottish New-Zealand heroine in Jane Campion’s 1993
film The Piano). At the same time the extradiegetic and intradiegetic
loci of representation are problematized: the authors creating these
resistant voices as well as some of their protagonists (Fish’s Elizabeth
Barrett; Soueif’s Anna, Layla, Amal, and Sharif; Pullinger’s Lucie Duff
Gordon) occupy the position of Spivak’s intellectual, thus reflecting
discursive dominance or, against the background of the Barrett family’s
sugar plantation, and Anna’s and Lucie’s fellow-expatriates, the power
of imperialism vis-à-vis the subaltern characters (Kaydia and Sheba in
Strange Music, the fallaheen in The Map of Love).

70 Neo-Victorianism
2.1. Hybridity and resistance in Amitav Ghosh’s

Sea of Poppies (2008)
Homi Bhabha’s influential argument, in ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’

(1985), that hybridity serves as a tool of colonial subjection – the hybrid,

like miscegenation, providing the antithesis of racial and linguistic
‘purity’ – while at the same time containing within it an impulse towards
subversion by opening up a space for resistance, is vividly illustrated in
the interplay of languages in Sea of Poppies, the first volume of Ghosh’s
projected Ibis Trilogy. The representatives of colonial power (such as the
ship’s pilot James Doughty and the capitalist-imperialist wife ‘Beebee’
Burnham) share their hybrid speech with the ethnically indeterminate
‘subaltern’, the head lascar (hired sailor)10 and ex-pirate Serang Ali.
Hybrid language, Ghosh notes in an interview, ‘came to reflect the reali-
ties of the lives of these characters. When a language spreads, it creates
these contact languages, which are basically pidgin languages.’11 The
majority of the Hindu, Urdu, and Bengali terms featured in the book, he
points out, are listed in the OED: ‘they are English words’: a reminder of
the multicultural and mutable nature of English, of the existence of not
one but multiple ‘world Englishes’,12 as well as a game with the Indian
reader who, like the author himself, may enjoy experimenting with
‘Hindi-English’.13 A detailed glossary, available in electronic format, plays
on the multiplicity of etymologies, usages and meanings for every term:
The Ibis Chrestomathy (fictively authored, ‘in the late 1880s’ – fifty years
after the events of the novel – by the dispossessed Raja reincarnated as the
Ibis community’s storyteller and historiographer, Neel Rattan Halder).14
Ghosh thus engages his readership in a complex reflection on the his-
torical development of English in its interaction with other cultures and
languages, illustrating the globalization of hybrid Englishes by posting his
Chrestomathy on the internet. What originated as Bengali, Arabic, Chinese,
Hind, Laskari becomes, ‘in its English incarnation’, ‘a new coinage, with
a new persona and a renewed destiny’;15 the language of Empire is sub-
verted into the languages and cultures of its subjects. The multiplicity of
variants in characters’ speech in Sea of Poppies replicates the multiple and
unstable spellings of the terms which fertilized the English language in
the nineteenth century.16 In contradistinction to the twenty-first-century
assumption that ‘in this age of globalisation . . . English is becoming more
and more expansive’, Ghosh draws attention to its potential impoverish-
ment in comparison with past centuries: ‘in the 19th century, English was
much wider, more accepting of other influences, especially Asian influ-
ences. Not just Hindustani but Chinese too. But what happened from the

Race and Empire 71
20th century was that they started ridding English of Asian influences.
English today is comparatively limited. – Which is why I feel that if . . .
Asian writers . . . are going to write in this language at all, then we must
reclaim for it what it historically had.’17
Indeed, as the nautical pilot Doughty impresses on the first mate of

the Ibis, the American freedman Zachary Reid (who is mistaken for a
white), ‘The zubben, dear boy, is the flash lingo of the East. It’s easy
enough to jin if you put your head to it. Just a little peppering of nigger-
talk mixed with a few girleys. But mind your Ordoo and Hindee doesn’t
sound too good; don’t want the world to think you’ve gone native.
And don’t mince your words either. Mustn’t be taken for a chee-chee.’18
Mince his words Doughty does not when he is humiliated publicly, in
Bengali, in front of his host, the Raja, by a dancer whose sexual services
he once enjoyed and whose unflattering gossip he now overhears: ‘Hot
cock and shittleteedee! . . . Damned badzat pootlies. You think I don’t
samjo your bloody bucking? There’s not a word of your black babble
I don’t understand. Call me a cunnylapper, would you? ‘D rather
bang the bishop than charter your chute. Licking, did you say? Here’s
my lattee to give you a licking . . . ’ (110). Doughty has to be dragged
off and handed into the safe-keeping of the lascars, cutting a rather
Quixotic figure of mortified disempowerment. Neither his hybridity
nor his grasp of the language of the subaltern here benefits the colonial
master. The dancer does not understand his words, and he is no longer
capable of speaking in any other way: his ability for multilingualism
and verbal pyrotechnics has atrophied in linguistic opacity. But then
Doughty is, overall, a harmless character, endowed with, as Zachary
reflects, a ‘kindly, even generous spirit’ (46), and much more interested
in his creature comforts than the oppression of the local populations.
Similarly, hybridity is turned into a comedy of miscomprehension
in the case of ‘Beebee’, the wife of the imperialist Benjamin Burnham
(a former slave trader who, after the abolition of slavery, deals in opium
and deportees instead). Beebee’s exchange with the penniless French-
born orphan Paulette Lambert about an offer of marriage represents
the near-collapse of colonial language. After her father’s death Paulette
has found a home with the Burnhams, but, having fallen in love with
Zachary, is alarmed by the existence of an undesired suitor, not least
because the man in question, a reactionary judge, stretched her patience
to its limits at the previous night’s dinner party:
‘Sentiments, my dear Puggly,’ [Mrs Burnham] said sternly, ‘are for

dhobis and dhashies. We mems can’t let that kind of thing get in the

72 Neo-Victorianism
way! No, dear, let me tell you – you’re lucky to have a judge in your
sights and you mustn’t let your bunduk waver. This is about as fine a
shikar as a girl in your situation could possibly hope for.’
. . . Suddenly, as her suspicions deepened [about Paulette’s evident
distress at the idea of the match], the Beebee cut herself short and

clamped her hands on her mouth. ‘Oh! dear, dear Puggly – tell me –
you haven’t . . . ? you haven’t . . . No! Tell me it isn’t so!’
‘What, Madame?’ said Paulette, in puzzlement.
The Beebee’s voice sank to a whisper. ‘You haven’t compromised
yourself, Puggly dear, have you? No. I will not credit it.’
‘Compromise, Madame?’ Paulette proudly raised her chin and
squared her shoulders. ‘In matters of the heart, Madame, I do not
believe that half-measures and compromises are possible. Does not
love demand that we give our all?’
‘Puggly . . .!’ Mrs Burnham gasped, fanning herself with a pillow.
‘Oh my dear! Oh heavens! Tell me, dear Puggly: I must know the
worst.’ She swallowed faintly and clutched her fluttering bosom: ‘ . . .
is there? . . . no surely there isn’t! . . . no . . . Lud! . . .’
‘Yes, Madame?’ said Paulette.
‘Puggly, tell me the truth, I conjure you: there isn’t a rootie in the
choola, is there?’
. . . Paulette was a little surprised . . . but she was glad, too, to have
the conversation turned in this new direction, since it presented
a good opportunity for escape. Hugging her stomach, she made a
moaning sound: ‘Madame, you are perfectly right: I am indeed a little
foireuse today.’
‘Oh dear, dear Puggly!’ The Beebee dabbed her streaming eyes
and gave Paulette a pitying hug. ‘Of course you are furious! Those
budzat sailors! With all their udlee-budlee, you’d think they’d leave
the larkins alone! . . . ’ (252–4)
Hopelessly at cross-purposes, neither grasps the other’s meaning.

Another burlesque of miscommunication is played out through situ-
ational rather than linguistic malapropism in the figure of the mad
‘gomusta’ (Burnham’s accountant and general functionary) Baboo
Nob Kissin. Nob believes that he is undergoing a process of reincar-
nation in which he is merging, in spirit and flesh, with the deceased
Ma Taramony: the woman he worshipped, his deeply religious uncle’s
wife who in widowhood became a renowned Vaishnavite saint and
before her death promised she would return to him. His growing delu-
sion about Zachary’s ‘real’ identity as Krishna in disguise considerably

Race and Empire 73
incommodes the object of his adoration. Zachary is mystified by Nob’s

references to his whistle and potential amorous desires, disconcerted
by his peculiar and persistent interest in him, and alarmed by queries
about his colour (Nob later responds with jubilation to the discovery
that Zachary is entered on the crew register as ‘black’). This flamboyant

character’s spiritual and bodily hybridity expresses itself in a progres-
sively subversive rejection of imperial codes of gender purity through
the public cultivation of femininity (by wearing his long hair loose
and dressing in Taramony’s clothes, imitating the swaying of her hips,
he believes he is opening himself up to interpenetration by her spirit,
thus commencing his, and her, re-embodiment). A naturally gentle
man (though he devises the means of Neel’s downfall), he passes on
to Paulette her father’s last words and her mother’s medallion and,
irrespective of the threat to his own position, arranges her passage on
the Ibis, where he is overcome by an irresistible ‘maternal’ urge to tend
to the needs of the convicts, finally to defy the law and hegemonic
structures altogether when he releases Neel and Ah Fatt into freedom.
By liberating the outlaws, thus enabling Ah Fatt to wreak a murderous
revenge on the first mate, Crowle, he becomes complicit with the insur-
rection which will change the ship’s destiny forever. In his religious
and personal delusions Nob represents a comic version of anti-imperial
resistance and insubordination and is therefore, as the narrator indicates
early on, fated to find entry, albeit as a caricature, in the Hindu heroine
Deetie’s ‘shrine’, her memorial record of the founding generation of the
emerging multicultural community (123).
Another member of this community, Paulette, while not immune from
the occasional blunder – she intermingles her English with French expres-
sions, to at times unwittingly humorous effect – is otherwise linguistically
astute, polyvocal, and ‘international’ in Homi Bhabha’s sense. Bhabha
argues that what he calls the ‘Third Space’ of enunciation, in which
meaning is produced by the dynamic interaction of speech acts, linguistic
performances, and cultural context, offers subversive opportunities for
intercultural engagement:
a willingness to descend into that alien territory . . . may . . . open

the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on
the exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but
on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that
end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge
of translation and negotiation, the in-between . . . that carries the
burden of the meaning of culture. . . . It is in this space that we will

74 Neo-Victorianism
find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others.
And by exploring this hybridity, this ‘Third Space’, we may elude
the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.19
Paulette is a native speaker of French and Bengali, the latter of which she

learnt from her adoptive mother and step-brother Jodu. Her bilingualism,
as well as her preference for saris, veiling customs, and resistance to
the raced and gendered status quo, enable her to accede to this ‘Third
Space’ and pass as an Indian, facilitating her escape from the Burnhams
and ensuring her undetected presence on the Ibis, in the very face of
sexual and racial stereotyping by the Captain, Charles Chillingsworth,
who previously dined in her company at the Burnhams’: ‘“This old
crone here, for instance,” said the Captain, looking directly at Paulette’s
hooded face. “A virgin-pullet if ever I saw one – often trod and never
laid! What conceivable purpose is served by transporting her across
the sea? . . . If you ask me, Doughty, it’d be a mercy to have her put
down’ (332). Not even Zachary who, despite his tender feelings refused
to countenance her plan of boarding the Ibis in the guise of a sailor, is
able to recognize her and feels perplexed when the elderly widow,
whose steps he wishes to steady, rudely pushes aside his helping hand.
It is only when Paulette erroneously translates an English idiom into
Bengali that Neel, the erstwhile Raja stripped of his title and possessions
by a fraudulent trial instigated by Burnham and sentenced to deporta-
tion for a crime he did not commit, detects her hybrid identity, but on
account of her low-caste Bengali assumes she is a prostitute who picked
up her English from her clients (361–2). Hybridity thus operates as a
complex and multifaceted metaphor of subversion: a means of resist-
ance which, more often than not, is misapprehended by the colonized
as much as by the colonizers.
For all their initial misapprehension of each other, the ‘subaltern’
group and those who throw in their lot with them, such as Paulette,
Zachary, and Nob, all share an important degree of multilingual and/or
intercultural proficiency which remains inaccessible to the imperialists.
While, with the exception of Doughty, none of the colonists under-
stands, let alone speaks, Bengali, the disgraced Raja is in supreme
command of the English language and British cultural heritage, and
finds that he unsettles the English with his learning (Hume, Locke,
Hobbes, and Chatterton are all equally unknown to the expatriates,
who resent Neel for his apparent familiarity with what they take to be
the colonial elite by whom they have been snubbed). At the culmina-
tion point of his humiliation, when after his trial he is strip-searched

Race and Empire 75
and manhandled and the jailor refuses to respond to his English, Neel
recognizes the subversive power of turning the master’s tools against
the representatives of the British Empire: ‘he had nettled him, simply
by virtue of addressing him in his own tongue – a thing that was
evidently counted as an act of intolerable insolence in an Indian con-

vict, a defilement of the language . . . [H]e still possessed the ability to
affront a man whose authority over his person was absolute . . . [H]e
decided . . . he would speak English whenever possible, everywhere
possible, starting with this moment, here’ (266).
As he comes to conceptualize English as a vehicle of resistance, Neel
begins to recover childhood memories which refamiliarize him with
his suppressed cultural heritage, the rural Bhojpuri, the language he
had learned from his closest advisor, Parimal (the servant who after
Neel’s imprisonment takes in his homeless wife and child), until he was
prohibited its use by his father. Now he discovers the potent lyricism
and mythological force of this ‘forbidden’ and ‘lowly’ language: ‘he
recognized that the secret source of its nourishment was music . . . of all
the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none
that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing
and separation’ (367). This recuperation of cultural memory enables
him not only to communicate with, and thus become accepted as part
of, the migrants with whom he shares the ship’s ‘between-deck’ but
from whom he is separated by his convict status and the walls of his
cell; it also confers upon him the power of storyteller as he recounts
the origins of the Ganga-Sagar Island they are in the process of pass-
ing, an ancient foundation myth20 which offers the diffuse group of
‘girmitiyas’ (indentured workers) a communal rite of passage as they
leave familiar geographies and their old lives behind. At the time of his
greatest material and physical dispossession, Neel’s hybrid cultural and
linguistic heritage thus facilitates his reclamation of his ethnic roots
and his entry into an indigenous community which respects him, for
the first time, for his wisdom rather than his family lineage.
Even Zachary, a monolingual speaker of English who experiences
some difficulty in decoding Doughty’s and Serang Ali’s speech, draws
on his sociolinguistic ‘talent for changing voices’ and registers for social
appointments and in his business dealings (47): in this way the light-
skinned son of a freed slave (whose name recalls Zachary Macaulay, the
Scottish abolitionist) is able to pass as white, rising to the position of
officer on a former slaver, and being issued with dinner invitations by
the local and colonial elite. The Raja even speculates about Zachary’s
high-born origins, while the first mate’s profound hostility is rooted

76 Neo-Victorianism
in his resentment of what he perceives to be Zachary’s privileged class

background. This miscomprehension is encouraged by Serang Ali
who, having recognized Zachary’s transformative talent, enthusiasti-
cally adopts his cause and equips him with the paraphernalia of white
European gentility (suits, shoes, a watch: the remains, as Zachary

discovers, of a renegade white, a pirate). To Serang Ali and the other
lascars, Zachary is ‘almost one of themselves’, and yet is ‘endowed with
the power to undertake an impersonation that was unthinkable for any
of them; it was as much for their own sakes as for his that they wanted
to see him succeed’ (46–7). Serang Ali’s name for Zachary (‘Malum
Zikri’, ‘one who remembers’, 238) indicates his wish for friendship
and solidarity across racial boundaries. Like Magwitch on Pip, Zachary
realizes that Serang Ali had ‘acquired a claim on him’ (21), which, like
Dickens’s hero, he is determined to shake off. In contradistinction to
Great Expectations, Zachary merely observes, but does not assist in, the
escape of his Magwitch. Serang Ali’s ultimate fate remains uncertain at
the close of the novel as he drifts off on one of the longboats in the
company of Kalua, Jodu, Neel, and Ah Fatt.
In Serang Ali and his lascars Ghosh depicts an ethnically diverse com-
munity which serves as a model for the intercultural kinship that begins
to develop among the migrants: ‘they came from places that were far
apart, and had nothing in common, except the Indian ocean; among
them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and
Goans, Tamils and Arakanese. They came in groups of ten or fifteen, each
with a leader who spoke on their behalf . . . To break up these groups was
impossible’ (12–13). Ghosh intended the lascars to represent India and
Asia’s ‘very deep and important contribution’ to the nautical industry of
the time. The parallel he draws between the lascars and today’s diasporic
IT workers,21 however, stands on shaky legs: Serang Ali’s nautical exper-
tise derives not from the latest technology but, rather, from long-standing
experience and age-old techniques. Thus Zachary finds that his use of a
watch and a sextant would have moved the ship ‘hundreds of miles off
course’, had Serang Ali not ‘been steering his own course all along, using
a method of navigation that combined dead reckoning . . . with frequent
readings of the stars’ (16). His recourse to astronomy, an ancient method
of navigation, correlates with his herbalist knowledge, which protects
Zachary from infection when the first Captain of the Ibis succumbs to
disease. While certainly the target of discrimination, the lascars do not
represent the ‘march of technological progress’ (this progress, Western-
style, as the text reminds us, is aligned with slavery, the opium trade,
and imperial oppression) so much as traditional knowledge, a communal

Race and Empire 77
spirit, and resistance. The driving force of the latter two is indicated in
their collective bargaining skills: ‘they had to be taken together or not at
all, and they had their own ideas of how much work they would do and
how many men would share each job’ (13).
Most importantly, Zachary discovers that Serang Ali was previously

involved in piracy. An insurgent against established authority, he is
united in common cause with the wrongfully convicted, deported for the
crime of their miscegenation (the Chinese-Parsi Ah Fatt) or their learning
and intelligence (Neel), and with the offenders against indigenous norms
of caste and religion: Jodu, the transgressor against religious sexual codes
(a Muslim, he is discovered during an assignment with Mania, a Hindu),
and Kalua, the martyred caste outlaw who strikes back in self-defence,
killing his tormentor, the sadistic ‘subedar’ (Indian army officer) Bhyro
Singh, in a spectacular scene of insurrection in the face of abject violence.
When Kalua is tied to the flogging stake, his arms prized apart as if in
mimicry of the crucifixion (this is a ship under ‘Christian’ command,
owned by the religious zealot Burnham, and Singh represents both native
and imperial hegemonies), he is cast, and abused, as the representative of
the subaltern group, the girmitiyas: ‘it was as if they were being primed,
not merely to watch the flogging, but actually to share in the experience
of pain . . . it was as if they were all, severally, being tied to the frame for
the flogging’ (446). As Chillingsworth reminds his officers, the British
Empire honours indigenous hierarchies of caste and religion because
they uphold the imperial project: ‘There is an unspoken pact between the
white man and the natives who sustain his power . . . that in matters of
marriage and procreation, like must be with like . . . The day the natives
lose faith in us, as the guarantors of the order of castes – that will be the
day . . . that will doom our rule’ (442).
Ironically, the colonists themselves embody the counter-principle
of the caste system they profess to protect: Burnham and Crowle are
self-made men who accomplished abroad what the British class system
would not have permitted them to achieve at home. Alienated from
themselves and their communities, and lacking the ‘multiplicity of
selves’ (407) which distinguish the non-colonists, they seek relief in
brute force, the religion of free trade (‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade and
Free Trade is Jesus Christ’, 106), and hollow phrases which bestow
a civilizing mission on imperialist greed. Burnham’s vindication of
slavery as ‘the march of human freedom’ (73) and of the opium trade
as ‘our God-given duty to confer these benefits upon others’ (106) pin-
points the ideological alliance of militarism, commerce, and religion
in the service of empire; the opium factories in which Deeti’s husband

78 Neo-Victorianism
and Ah Fatt’s father work in Ghazipur and Canton are ‘institutions

steeped in Anglican piety’ (83). This alliance also shapes the politics
of slavery, religious fanaticism and domestic patriarchal despotism in
Strange Music and the British occupation of Egypt in The Map of Love.
Thus it is not only Elizabeth’s slave-owning father, but even the freed

slave Tippy who ‘sketched a pretty scene of how happily the Negroes
lived when the sugar estates were in their prime’;22 and the Oriental
Secretary Mr Boyle declares, in flat denial of the Egyptian independ-
ence movement, that ‘the country had never been run so efficiently
and . . . the Egyptians had never been happier or more prosperous
than under Lord Cromer’.23 ‘It is this pretense of virtue’, the Ibis’s
captain warns Burnham, ‘that will never be forgiven by history’ (242).
Burnham admits that the economic threat of Chinese trade restric-
tions is the underlying reason for the impending Opium War: ‘To put
the matter simply: there is nothing they want from us . . . But we,
on the other hand, can’t do without their tea and their silks. If not
for opium, the drain of silver from Britain and her colonies would be
too great to sustain . . . British rule in India could not be sustained
without opium and that is all there is to it’ (103, 106).24 Without the
enforced monocultural cultivation of poppy in India, which deprives
entire villages of food crops (a danger that the paternalist landowner
Sharif averts in The Map of Love by dissuading the fallaheen from mov-
ing ‘wholesale into cotton as Cromer would have them do’, 257), and
without the enforced trading of opium in China, the British Empire
would be imperilled. The novel’s title signals the hold poppy has taken
on the Indian countryside: ‘lands that had once provided sustenance
were now swamped by the rising tide of poppies’ (187). The ravages
of the opium trade on individuals and communities are highlighted
at the start of the text, when Deeti reflects on the back-breaking and
unprofitable nature of poppy farming:
what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there
were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables?
But . . . the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted;
their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances
on the farmers, making them sign asámi contracts. . . . It was no
use telling the white magistrate that you hadn’t accepted the
money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions
on the opium and would never let you off. And, at the end of it,
your earnings would come to . . . just about enough to pay off your
advance. (27)

Race and Empire 79
Deeti’s first husband, Hukam Singh, and the Chinese-born Ah Fatt are
victims of addiction. Hukam works in an opium factory, many of whose
workers are addicts like him. His wedding night is spent in opium-induced
dreams, while, to ensure procreation, his drugged wife, an unwilling
Draupadi,25 is raped by his younger brother in the presence of her in-laws,

his mother and his uncle, Bhyro Singh. The horrendous consequences
of opium on the body of the addict are depicted graphically in Ah Fatt’s
withdrawal symptoms: when Neel first encounters his fellow-convict,
he is skeletal, comatose, soiled with excrement, periodically jolted into
motion by trembling fits. Neel’s nursing returns him to consciousness,
yet their deep friendship is as nothing when Ah Fatt is offered opium in a
sadistic game Crowle and Bhyro Singh play on the convicts to edge them
into betraying each other; he does, instantly.
The notion of any kind of moral responsibility for the personal and
communal wreckage caused by the opium trade is coldly refuted by
Burnham, the representative of the East India Company: ‘what would
our ladies – why, our beloved Queen herself? – do without laudanum?
Why, one might even say that it is opium that has made this age of
progress and industry possible: without it, the streets of London would
be thronged with coughing, sleepless, incontinent multitudes. And if
we consider all this, is it not apposite to ask if the Manchu tyrant has
any right to deprive his helpless subjects of the advantages of progress?’
(107). Progress and precision are the principles that drive the produc-
tion process in the Ghazipur Opium Factory in which Deeti recovers
her husband after his collapse. As Ghosh notes, the factory tour in
chapter 5 was inspired by J.W.S. Macarthur’s Notes on an Opium Factory
(1865),26 a text written by the superintendent of the Ghazipur factory
in the style of a travelogue for British tourists. Here the imperial project
joins hands with the Orientalist construction of the East.
The devastation wreaked by opium is juxtaposed to the spiritual
transformation the migrants undergo on board the Ibis: starting off
as a disparate assemblage of homeless ‘coolies’, they quickly grow
into a close-knit kinship group. This rebirth into a new communal
identity is overseen by two mother figures: the vessel itself, literally
and figuratively a womb (397) – ‘a great wooden mái-báp, an adop-
tive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come’ (328) – and Deeti,
the founding mother of the new extended family emerging from
it. Ghosh’s choice of a ship as the setting for his story was, he says,
influenced by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851); further inspira-
tion came from Melville’s story ‘Benito Cereno’ (1855) about a boat
controlled by slaves, and The Encantadas (1854), a book of sketches

80 Neo-Victorianism
about the Galapagos Islands, itself motivated by Darwin’s Voyage of

the Beagle (1839).27
In its emblematic role as a ‘vehicle of transformation’ (388) the Ibis
becomes an enchanted space, the realm of magic realism. The realism
of the earlier depiction of the factory here makes way for a symbolic

narrative. In realistic terms it would be difficult to imagine how the
all-too close proximity of life in the cramped and airless quarters of
the between-deck, minimally upgraded from its previous use as a slave
container, or the even more confined space and non-existent amenities
of the convict cell, could create ‘an atmosphere of urgent intimacy’
instead of prompting feelings of rampant claustrophobia (223). The
focus on communal concord and fusion correlates with the features Said
attributes to postcolonial ‘narratives of emancipation and enlighten-
ment’: ‘integration not separation’.28 It is Paulette who first articulates
the new quasi-familial bond: ‘From now on, and forever afterwards, we
will all be ship-siblings – jaházbhais and jaházbahens – to each other.
There’ll be no differences between us’ (328). Like Neel earlier on, Deeti
and the other migrants overcome the internalized caste system. Deeti,
the quintessential subaltern sati of Spivak’s essay, the widow released
into a second life when saved from her husband’s funeral pyre by the
ox-cart driver Kalua, attains the status of female elder when she starts
speaking up for the community. Thus when one of the girmitiyas dies,
the protest she organizes forces the captain to concede limited funeral
rites. Deeti is consulted about marriage and increasingly charged with
arranging the affairs of the community: ‘it was as if she had been
appointed the matron of the dabusa by common consent’ (395). Heeru’s
wedding, which she oversees, further cements the communal bond.
Tragically, the ‘sacramental circle of matrimony’ in which the migrants
are joined together (429) is broken up by violence when Jodu is discov-
ered with Mania and Deeti and Kalua are exposed by Bhyro Singh. The
novel’s conclusion is open-ended, suggesting both the possibility of
escape and uncertainty about the fate of the fugitives, while repeated
references throughout to Deeti’s shrine and the long family line to come
into being from her second marriage promise the survival and reunion
of the characters. The final lines’ focus on Deeti’s piercing grey eyes
return us to her opening vision of a tall-masted ship which launched
her into her inner ‘voyage out’. The journey motif with its literal and
metaphorical passage to a new self, a new life, a new society combines
self-liberation with the threat of a new enslavement: the destination of
the Ibis is Mauritius, a French-speaking British penal colony, where the
indentured workers are awaited eagerly by sugar planters desperate to

Race and Empire 81
replace their slave labourers set free by the end of the ‘apprenticeship’
system in 1838.
While the British slave trade had been abolished in 1807, the Ibis’s
previous use as a slaver indicates how recently the trade had been operat-
ing illegally. Nor did the Emancipation Act of 1833 put a stop to slavery

in British island colonies; as Christine Bolt observes, the introduction of
the apprenticeship system effectively continued it: ‘vagrancy laws and
legislation confin[ed] the freedmen to their former masters’ estates or
to specific localities, . . . permitting severe corporal punishment, as well
as fixing hours of work and allowances for food, clothing, medicine
and lodgings. Although the experiment came to an end in 1838, . . . the
efforts of the planter class to ease their labour problem through import-
ing indentured labourers, mainly from India, were seen as tending
to introduce a disguised form of slavery.’29 The vexed question at the
end of Sea of Poppies is thus whether Zachary, the son of a freed slave, is
leading Deeti’s community to a new form of bondage.
2.2. Voices across borders: Laura Fish’s

Strange Music (2008)
Where Sea of Poppies ends, Strange Music begins: with the horrendous
conditions in the transitional period just after the nominal abolition
of the apprenticeship system on another island under British rule,
Jamaica. ‘Slavery’s ended . . . All we free free’, a field labourer triumphs,
only to be reminded by Sheba, one of the three first-person narrators:
‘Yu full-a-foolishness . . . Way we liv jus git worse’ (26). The contract
imposed on them under the apprenticeship system keeps their wages
to half the going rate,30 disabling them from putting money aside for
buying freeholds and setting up elsewhere, while requiring them to
work twice as much to make up for depleted numbers, with the fear
that if the crop is not harvested in time, they will be paid nothing at
all (29). Working conditions are dire and the wage-contract system
is a farce; their rights are as non-existent as they were under slavery:
the overseers are wielding whips, their shacks are set on fire, Sheba’s
lover Isaac is beaten to death, Isaac’s mother Eleanor and Sheba are
gang-raped by marauding militia men, and the master picks his mis-
tresses from among the most vulnerable and voiceless: girls under ten
and indentured child workers imported from Africa with scarce com-
mand of English. The final year of the apprenticeship system, 1838,
and the immediate post-apprenticeship period see the persistence of
sexual slavery, lynchings, and brutal reprisals against the background

82 Neo-Victorianism
of the plantation owners’ dance of death in the face of financial ruin.

The militia men’s assault takes place in August, a few weeks after the
apprenticeship system was officially abolished on 31 July.31 The novel
is set at Greenwood and Cinnamon Hill Estate, the Jamaican sugar
plantation of the Barretts, and in Torquay. The field labourer Sheba’s

voice (who recounts the events from April 1838 to May 1839) is com-
plemented by that of Kaydia, a housemaid (whose thoughts revolve
around Sam Barrett’s abuse of her under-age daughter Mary Ann and
his death in February 1840).32 The third narrator is Elizabeth Barrett,
recovering from debilitating illness in Torquay, who in letters and
diary entries written between November 1838 and April 1840 struggles
to face up to her family legacy of slavery and develops her vision as a
politically engaged artist by starting to write a poem about a fugitive
female slave.
Drawing as it does on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s family circum-
stances, actual correspondence,33 diary entries,34 her father’s estate in
Jamaica, and her brother Sam’s involvement in the management of
quasi-slavery conditions, this novel, like The Mistress of Nothing, makes
a contribution to the hybrid genre of neo-Victorian bio-fiction,35 while
its imaginative re-vision of Barrett Browning’s ‘The Runaway Slave at
Pilgrim’s Point’ also engages with neo-Victorian adaptation in the style of
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London (1989)
and Tess (1993), Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990), and A.N. Wilson’s
A Jealous Ghost (2005), which rewrite canonical Victorian texts (Jane
Eyre, Jekyll and Hyde, Tess, The Turn of the Screw). The first-person narra-
tor of ‘Runaway Slave’ sees her black lover savagely murdered, is raped
by his killers, among whom is her master, and bears a child ‘far too
white – too white for me’.36 After smothering the baby and burying it
in dark soil she becomes ‘reconciled’ to what has now been returned
to blackness.37 She escapes, but the slave-hunters catch up with her at
Pilgrim’s Point, where she dies at the flogging-post.
Fish’s three women’s voices intermingle in and through the ‘strange
music’ of their echoes of Barrett Browning’s poem, written in 1846 dur-
ing the Brownings’ honeymoon in Pisa.38 The poem was commissioned
(probably by Maria Weston Chapman) for and first appeared in the abo-
litionist yearbook of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, The Liberty
Bell, in 1848, and was revised several times until 1856 (this final version
is reproduced in Fish’s book).39 The novel’s title is taken from Robert
Browning’s first (1845) letter to Elizabeth Barrett, reprinted in extract as an
epigraph to the ‘Prologue’. Browning refers to the ‘fresh strange music’ of
her poetry;40 in the novel Elizabeth records in her diary: ‘If I can sweeten

Race and Empire 83
this strange music called life, add light to dismal, sombre, unharmonious
tones, I shall be pleased yet’ (129). Apart from ‘Runaway Slave’ Fish notes
two further central influences: ‘Strategy’ (1996) by the Chinese-Jamaican
poet and Anglican priest Easton Lee, and Wide Sargasso Sea. Her novel
thus performs a sophisticated process of imaginative reconceptualization,

interpolating Victorian, neo-Victorian, and postcolonial sources. The
dramatic monologue of ‘Runaway Slave’ is recreated in Sheba’s voice,
while Kaydia’s experience reflects Lee’s ‘Strategy’ of resistance through
mimicry: in the poem an older female slave advises a younger woman to
pre-empt rape by anticipating the master’s desire (Kaydia’s intervention
is an exact transposition of the old woman’s words), and to improve her
condition with the production of mixed-race children: ‘When you get in
a him bed / shut you eye tight, grit you teeth / . . . for all you want is a
brown baby / that guarantee privilege’.41 A risky strategy: in Sea of Poppies
Zachary’s mother is manumitted after giving birth to a light-skinned
son, but in Valerie Martin’s Property (2003) Sarah remains a (sexual) slave;
the master she loathes never tires of her, and she additionally becomes
the target of her mistress’s cruelty.
As Kaydia discovers in Strange Music, her mother Rebecca Laslie too
chose this path: Kaydia is not her father’s daughter but the product of
Rebecca’s liaison with her master, Elizabeth’s Uncle Samuel, and while
Rebecca secured a small house and a (contested) legacy42 (and her light-
skinned daughter found a position on his nephew’s estate rather than
in the fields), she pays a heavy price in the loss of her family and the
lack of closeness to her daughter. Kaydia herself does not reap any ben-
efits from her seduction of Sam. Here Kaydia’s story also revisits Wide
Sargasso Sea: like Antoinette she ‘looks to a white man for salvation’,43
realizing too late that her sacrifice was in vain. She cannot protect
her daughter, Mary Ann, from Sam’s predatory desire, nor do her own
sexual compliance and subsequent pregnancy result in a bequest like
that of her mother’s. Sam Barrett, who as his uncle’s executor continues
to withhold Rebecca’s legacy, is an unlikely candidate for offerings of
any kind. Like Rhys’s heroine Mary Ann disintegrates under the impact
of white masculinity. Wide Sargasso Sea also offers a context for Fish’s
choice of multiple narrators:
As with Wide Sargasso Sea, each voice in my novel arises in a setting

where the question of whether anyone will listen is real and urgent . . .
The juxtaposition of the three female voices . . . provides the basis for
[a] speculative journey, one that shows how people might imagina-
tively understand and have solidarity with those they do not directly

84 Neo-Victorianism
know. I have wanted to sustain a tension between the reality of each

woman’s isolation and the possibility of their unrealized solidarity,
between the immediate pressures on them and their longing for a
different world. The book therefore expresses hope and a possibility
of liberation and change.44

Kaydia and Sheba meet fleetingly, at market, when each is facing her
greatest crisis: Kaydia is reeling from the discovery of her origins (as
Samuel’s child and Sam’s cousin) and her violent break-up with her
mother (which resulted in the latter suffering a miscarriage); Sheba has
given birth to her rape-child and is in deep anguish. Their tragedy is that
neither knows of the other’s condition, thus the rapport each feels and
seeks is not realized. When Kaydia recognizes Sheba as one of the field
slaves from Cinnamon Hill she has ‘an urge to reach out’ – ‘My feeling of
wanting, to touch, to pull my hand from my chest is so strong’ – but she
‘cannot speak’ because, ‘[w]rapped in some terrible secret, [Sheba] does
nothing but stare . . . All of what I am like dead blossoms wilts to nothing’
(164). Sheba, too, has the impulse to connect: ‘A woman stumbles against
me. Curses. Me seen she face at Cinnamon Hill; eyes grief-filled. . . . In a
violent rush of passing pickney she’s whisked from me sight . . . Inside me
flare, too long imprisoned, storm-like, it a anger of anguish briefly uncov-
ered, me must think of something to make she hear, make she see. . . . But
already she’s lost in a flood of market sellers’ (188).
The only lasting connection that is made in the novel is of the imagi-
nation: that of the poet’s. If Elizabeth’s picture, among a number of
paintings Sam has brought back with him from his visit home, leaves
only a passing impression on Kaydia (98–9), Elizabeth is first haunted
and then progressively mesmerized by her visions of a black woman, a
ghostly and silent visitor who comes to her in her opium dreams. In the
course of her mental journey she moves beyond her narcissistic preoccu-
pation with herself (her illness, the central theme of her letters) and her
family’s affairs to visualize Leah (the obeah woman), Sheba (who in her
imagination merges with another slave of her cousin Richard’s stories,
Quasheba, called Venus in Sheba’s story, 36), and Kaydia’s daughter
Mary Ann. Confined to her room, with letters and a view of Torquay
harbour constituting the only link to the outside world, Elizabeth starts
conceiving of herself as a ‘blind poet’, directing her energies inwardly
(129).45 This focus on her inner life enables her to confront internal con-
flicts: emotionally chained to a despotic, larger-than-life father, who put
her under house arrest for signing a petition against the apprenticeship
system, she suffers from a profound depression born of her horror of the

Race and Empire 85
legacy of slavery: ‘How to escape a polluted family? . . . [A]ll those whom

I most dearly love . . . are implicated in this crime, as well as myself. Our
decadence makes me sick. . . . Why has it taken so long for this realiza-
tion to form, and for me to confront the facts?’ (116). Her wounded,
stricken body, her near-paralysis stand as the symbol of the guilt and

shame attached to the family. And yet, as she is well aware, the material
benefits of her heritage keep her in comfort and safeguard her independ-
ence (125).46 When the opportunity arises to make a small intervention,
she promptly circumvents it: on his visit home, her brother Sam asks
her advice about their uncle’s bequest to Rebecca Laslie, and Elizabeth
hastily retreats into platitudes: ‘If I could assist him in some even small
way, I would’ (113). A simple reference to her uncle’s original wish might
sway him, but the thought that ‘rumours of impropriety between this
servant and Uncle Samuel will spread like fire . . . if she does receive the
legacy’ (113) keeps her conspicuously silent: the fate of the servant is as
nothing when held against the standing of the family. Fish here creates
a believably contradictory character who, for all her imaginative empa-
thy with the protagonists of her inner vision, continues to collude with
the system when her own life might be affected. Indeed, the histori-
cal Barrett Browning would propose that her marriage announcement
carry a reference to ‘Wimpole Street & Jamaica . . . or & Cinnamon Hill,
Jamaica’ and had to be pulled up by Robert Browning: ‘the name &
“Wimpole St.” will do – Jamaica, – sounds in the wrong direction, does
it not?’47
It is only in her dream world that Elizabeth is able to connect
with the experiences of slaves and experiment with the assumption
of a black subjectivity. A series of opium-induced visions shape her
imaginative encounter with the ‘Other’, the woman in the mirror,
guiding her towards the conception of her poem on the ‘Runaway
Slave’. While some of her waking dreams furnish an image of her own
future with Robert Browning, the vast majority are of a black woman.
The first time she glimpses this ‘other’ woman it is her own reflection
she sees; here already the leitmotif of her later poem (‘I am black’)
comes to the fore:
I am small and black . . . A thin partition divides us; why do I regard

the woman who watches me with distaste? She has a searching quiz-
zical look, slightly remote and mischievous; the features, wasted . . .
The mouth is large, obstinate, projecting – she is full-lipped – and has
dark eyes, deep and calm, and long thick ringlets, again, dark brown,
almost black[.] (10)

86 Neo-Victorianism
As Jane Markus has argued (from whose biography this passage is

adapted),48 Barrett Browning believed she had inherited African blood
from her grandfather Charles Moulton, and wrote to Robert Browning
that she would have preferred to bring to their marriage ‘some purer
lineage than that of the blood of the slave’.49 Markus’s hypothesis of

the Barretts’ mixed race has been discredited and Barrett Browning’s
letter interpreted in light of her discomfort with her family’s slavery
past,50 but in Fish’s novel Elizabeth’s ‘distaste’ is directed both at her
incapacitating illness and her quasi-African looks; much later, as she is
about to start working on her poem, she still wonders whether ‘black
[can] represent beauty?’ (182). Not surprisingly, then, this experience
of (self-)rejection is succeeded by a vision of Brontë’s Bertha Mason,
with ‘wild matted hair’, setting fire to a ‘house of memories’ (12). This
image recurs towards the end of the novel, when Elizabeth decides that
the ‘[w]alls of silence’ erected around slavery ‘must be knocked down’
(118), and in her mind’s eye sees a woman (herself) with a young boy
(her future son) symbolically destroying her family heritage by burning
a tapestry replica of Hope End, the English family seat funded with the
proceeds of slavery and lost to her father’s declining fortunes (173–4).
Her inner vision thus progresses from literary cliché to the literature
of abolitionism, from associating blackness with illness (her body’s
condition) to identifying with the woman slave in a world of white
male violence.
As she contemplates writing about slavery, ‘to reach the oppressed
through thought’, Elizabeth reflects on the boundaries of subjectivity
and authorial ventriloquism: ‘Can we not imagine ourselves into
another’s skin? Can we not dream ourselves into another world . . . ?
Give breath and life to histories that otherwise might not live?’ (18).
Haunted by the horrifying reminiscences of her white Jamaican cousin
Richard Barrett of the terrible punishments meted out to fugitive
slaves, she becomes preoccupied by the thought of a slave woman
called Quasheba, tortured despite her advanced pregnancy (Richard
was involved in hunting her down, and later is one of the men raping
her near-namesake Sheba). The specifically sexual violence endured by
female slaves conjures up the image of a young girl ‘suffering a general
feeling of malaise, aches and pains and convulsive twitches of the
muscles. Her skin is blotched red as if affected by measles.’ Wracked by
‘paroxysms . . . she enters a hell of writhing agitation, into which most
would feel loath to look. Vainly does she struggle. She’s been buried
for thousands of years in a coffin of the thickest wood, the conflicts
and horrors and evil nightmares are over-powering’ (61). An allegory

Race and Empire 87
of slavery, this is also a concrete visualization of the young Mary Ann

abused by Sam Barrett, as recorded by Kaydia:
Mary Ann had monsters in the head. Some days she skin went hot
and strange smells lived in she hair. . . . Hours later I’d find she – straw

tangled into matted hair; dress skew-whiff; small body balled-up tight
like she was cornered by life . . . Mary Ann grew lumps in she mouth,
throat too . . . And she disappeared haunted me like all she other
strange acts. Why she cowered, cat-like, from everyone . . . Wouldn’t
shine Mister Sam’s boots, scrub or polish yacca floor in him blue bed-
chamber. Said she hated blue. . . . Blue dress from England Mister Sam
give she. . . . Kicking, fighting, snarling, wildly matted mane muddled
round she honey-brown neck, screaming like she felt tackle hell’s
fire when Mister Sam forced she into that blue dress. He forced my
daughter into its bodice, stiff-shouldered and hunched as a soldier she
strutted across great-house hall. Then spewed everywhere. . . . That
night she shredded that dress. (44–6)
Mary Ann is the ultimate ‘subaltern’ of Spivak’s description. In contra-

distinction to the adult women, she cannot tell her story. Her speech is
largely limited to sounds: crying, whining, shouting, screaming. Muted,
traumatized, and maddened, she represents a young Bertha Mason who
can articulate only her rage. When Kaydia returns from market without
the candles she wanted, she ‘headbutts my neck, tin knuckles beat my grey
skirt; fists hammer my chest’ (167). She is the quintessential victim, com-
pelled to return to her abuser, again and again, instead of seeking shelter
with her mother, who attempts to protect her by distracting Sam’s atten-
tion towards herself. But there is nowhere for Mary Ann to turn: Kaydia
lives on the estate, and her father previously whipped her so brutally
that she carries permanent scars on her face. For her there is no escape,
however desperate, like Sheba’s infanticide and suicide, or Kaydia’s flight;
she is trapped for good and has no mental conception of her condition.
The young girl destroyed before her body has had time to grow into
womanhood paves the way for Elizabeth’s vision of Sheba and her
baby. She sees the familiar woman, but now she is nursing a mixed-
race baby. It is only from the baby’s response that she realizes what
is happening: ‘The baby’s face crumples up; its cry turns into a wail.
Worst of all the little neck swells becoming scarred and red, the face
blood-spattered . . . A Negro baby, here in my room? Surely it isn’t kin
of mine’ (173). Ironically, the baby may well be kin, since her cousin
Richard is one of Sheba’s rapists. Elizabeth’s disclaimer recaptures her

88 Neo-Victorianism
earlier anxiety about her racial heritage, and provides a link with her
father’s imposition of a marriage embargo on his children.51 Edward
Barrett’s unacknowledged concerns provide a context for Sheba’s infan-
ticide: ‘If Papa fears dark offspring, would Quasheba not fear a white
child? Would the reminder not be sickening to her also? The master’s

look’ (185).52 The analogy between her father’s and Sheba’s rejection
of the mixed-raced child places greater moral culpability on the former
while generating understanding for the latter. That the raped woman
can only loathe the material reminder of the violence she suffered is
comprehensible; but ‘is Papa killing his grandchildren by preventing
their births? Is this not some kind of murder?’ (184). As she considers
the slave woman’s feelings, Elizabeth begins to ‘experience an intense
bond similar to sisterhood – a unity with the runaway’s cause’ (183) –
and starts to write. In Elizabeth’s project of empathetic remembering
Fish extends Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory: the collective
re-membering of communal trauma is complemented by an individual
act of bearing witness to trauma shared imaginatively through identi-
fication: ‘How to not sympathize but empathize. Imagination is like
the act of remembering, without memory being in the consciousness’
(183). Processes of imaginative remembering are crucial to the work of
the writer, especially if she carries the burden of collective hereditary
guilt. The central issues she wanted to address in her novel, Fish states,
are ‘the need for atonement’ and the ‘relationship between the literary
imagination and the social, political and ethical responsibility and
obligation of the writer’. Elizabeth’s ‘trying to reach out’ to Kaydia and
Sheba is ‘part of the process of her maturing as a writer’.53
In the act of imagining Quasheba’s experience, Elizabeth finds that
her reflections merge with her protagonist’s dramatic monologue, creat-
ing a dialogue where before there was only an image in the mirror. This
dialogue becomes a trialogue, as Fish, a British-Caribbean writer, imagines
Elizabeth Barrett, slavery’s daughter, envision a slave woman’s life; and
ultimately turns into a quatrologue by involving the contemporary reader
in processes of identification:
I am black, I am black! And yet God made me they say: but if He

did so, smiling back He must have cast His work away under the feet
of his white creatures, with a look of scorn, that the dusky features
might be trodden again to clay.54
This is where spirit meets flesh.
Imagine Quasheba, a wretched black soul on bended knee, a
Christian, pleading for her right to live. Did her white masters whip

Race and Empire 89
her lover to death? They dragged him . . . where? . . . She crawled

to touch his blood’s mark in the dust . . . 55 How much grief, I ask,
must her soul bear? ‘Mere grief’s too good for such as I,’ comes the
woman slave’s reply, ‘so the white man brought the shame ere long
to strangle the sob in my throat thereby. They would not leave me

for my dull wet eyes! – it was too merciful – to let me weep pure tears,
and die.’56
Cousin Richard said of Quasheba that she probably strangled her
own child, and must be without her faculties. He defined her by
what she was not. . . . [I]t stands to reason that this runaway slave
was neither bad, nor mad57 – if I focus on what she was, then perhaps
I can wear the cloak of change. (183–4)
As a vehicle of political transformation Barrett Browning’s ballad,58 like

authentic slave narratives by Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, 1845) and Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl, 1860), Francis Harper’s 1859 poem ‘The Slave Mother: A Tale of the
Ohio’, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), is addressed
to a white readership in the North (Plymouth Rock, Massachussetts, was
a symbol of liberty in abolitionist literature).59 The speaker’s appeal to the
‘pilgrim-souls’60 who came to America in quest of freedom casts slavery’s
‘white men’ and ‘hunter-sons’61 in a role equivalent to their ancestors’
religious persecutors, representing the abolitionist community and above
all the slaves as the morally rightful heirs to the founding fathers. The
poem resonates with the assertion of the speaker’s black identity and her
representative status62 and culminates in a ‘declaration of sentiments’:
‘I am not mad, – I am black!’63 ‘Runaway Slave’ was published in the year
of the first Seneca Falls convention, which inaugurated the American
women’s rights movement (a movement which developed out of aboli-
tionism, established in response to the dismissal of the American women
delegates at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840).64
The feminist ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ was modelled on the American
‘Declaration of Independence’, which is conjured up in the poem’s refer-
ence to Washington, the first president of the independent nation. This
inheritance of ‘Free America’ is wrongfully denied to the slave, whose
association with the American eagle again emphasizes the legitimacy of
her claim.65 The ‘unnatural’ act of infanticide reflects on the aberrance of
a system which violates the very principle of its foundation. Slavery, the
poem emphasizes, ‘artificially divides the world in two, severs the bio-
logical . . . bond between mother and child, and even splits the subject’.66
As Marjorie Stone’s comparison of the poem with other publications

90 Neo-Victorianism
in the Liberty Bell indicates, Barrett Browning aligned herself with the
radical politics of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and William
Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society rather than with the
more conservative racial and sexual politics of the New England and
British anti-slavery societies, and further radicalized existing abolitionist

topoi with her graphic depiction of infanticide and her protagonist’s call
for a slave insurrection.67
Female slaves who killed children resulting from rape, Barbara
Christian argues with reference to Morrison’s Beloved,68 ‘might be seen
as striking out at the master/rapist and resisting the role of perpetuating
the system of slavery through breeding’.69 This reflects Leah’s instruc-
tions, the obeah woman to whom the pregnant Sheba turns in her
anguish: ‘[Buckra] Pickney isn’t made of bones, skin, flesh, blood. Kill it.
KILL IT afore ninth day’ (191, emphasis in original; also 144–5). Barrett
Browning’s protagonist appears to take a ‘mad’ pleasure in observing
that emblem of the slave master, the male white child, struggle for his
freedom, vainly; madness here is encoded as the madness of slavery, but
also as the rage and counter-violence that slavery breeds in its victims
(the poem was originally entitled ‘Mad and Black at Pilgrim’s Point’).70
By contrast, Sheba suffers a breakdown as a result of her desperately con-
flicting impulses. It is only after her attempt to save her child by passing
it on to the departing Kaydia has failed that she is driven to carry out
Leah’s orders. There is no symbolic threat of a slave insurrection as in
Barrett Browning’s words (‘We are too heavy for our cross / And fall and
crush you and your seed’),71 only desolation, as Sheba, distraught after
burying her child, wades into the sea.
Kaydia, who also carries a white man’s child within her, takes the
opposite course of action. When she sees Mary Ann riding away with
Charles, her former lover and Mary Ann’s father (the man who scarred
her with his whip, while she sought to protect her), she runs away,
not into death like Barrett Browning’s slave, but into freedom: ‘Can’t
bear losing another pickney. Can’t take that risk. So I run away from
Charles, from Mary Ann’ (205). In contradistinction to Sheba she does
not turn towards but away from the sea: ‘Feeling warmth of smooth-
stoned coast road I branch off other way, swerve from Montego Bay.
Run away. Coast road to Falmouth’s empty. Open. Rising. Rum flowed
red. Screaming gone. Dead’ (205).
Suicide (Sheba); escape (Kaydia); liberation (from her family inher-
itance, into politically motivated art: Elizabeth): Strange Music offers
three alternatives to Barrett Browning’s dénouement. Ambiguous, even
ominous as Kaydia’s final words are, the sunrise that accompanies her

Race and Empire 91
flight represents a new beginning: a life beyond our control. ‘Gone’:

where Barrett Browning’s slave, as Sarah Brophy has argued, is frozen into
a spectacle to be repossessed by the white male gaze,72 Kaydia removes
herself from the narratorial and readerly vision and, like Christophine
in Wide Sargasso Sea, ‘walk[s] away without looking back.’73 Even Sheba’s

drowning, prefaced as it is by the memory of Isaac’s embrace, carries
a subdued note of celebration, reviving a memory of fulfilment at the
moment of death: ‘warmth of you arm round me shoulder; lying, lip to
lip; you body warmth, salt of you breath, and kissing you sleeping head’
(197). Unlike Barrett Browning’s slave, whose last thoughts are directed
towards her abusers, Sheba turns her back on slavery and ‘returns home’
to her lover. These acts of self-affirmation reflect Fish’s intention ‘to
present women who are seeking to discover ways to overcome or change
their circumstances and sense of being trapped. I wanted to find a way
to celebrate this, to write a song of liberation, as opposed to presenting
characters as victims striving against all the odds.’74
2.3. Orientalism and transculturalism: Ahdaf Soueif’s

The Map of Love (1999) and Kate Pullinger’s
The Mistress of Nothing (2009)
The structuring device of interlocking narratives of (personal/political)

liberation set against the backdrop of colonial and cultural-imperialist
rule is also a central feature of Soueif’s The Map of Love, which connects
women’s voices from the past and the present through the imagina-
tion of a contemporary female writer figure, Amal al-Ghamrawi, who
as a left-wing Egyptian intellectual writing in English acts as an avatar
of Soueif. Here, the key metaphor is not of music (though music has a
powerful effect on the affective life of the turn-of-the-century heroine)75
but of embroidery and weaving: the ‘subversive stitch’ (needlework,
embroidery, quilting)76 is a recurrent symbol in women’s writing;
notable postcolonial examples include Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple
(1983) and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). In The Map of Love
weaving, as a metaphor for the feminist project of revision, is closely
related to the (proto)postcolonial espousal of hybridity, reflected in
Amal’s (and other characters’) multilingualism, translationism,77 and
interculturalism.
With an estranged English husband and two adult sons in Britain,
while she lives in Cairo, and as a literary translator, Amal straddles
two cultures, and thus is the ‘true’ heir of the turn-of-the-century Lady
Anna Winterbourne, her English great-aunt by Anna’s second marriage

92 Neo-Victorianism
to the Egyptian nationalist Sharif al-Baroudi. ‘What difference do a

hundred years – or a continent – make?’ (12), Amal asks when she
first reads Anna’s diary: ‘the sense of Anna speaking to me – writing
it down for me – is so powerful that I find myself speaking to her
in my head. At night, in my dreams, I sit with her and we speak as

friends and sisters’ (306). The novel is set largely in Egypt, in two time
periods whose political events in the history of the country are placed
in close comparison: the fin de siècle and first decade of the twentieth
century (1896–1911: pace Nasser, in the novel’s first epigraph, ‘the
most fertile [period] in Egypt’s history’, n.p.) and the years approaching
the millennium (1997–98). The turn of centuries is here coded as a
significant moment of cultural, political, and personal transformation.
The newly widowed Lady Winterbourne arrives in Egypt in 1900, in the
final year of Victoria’s reign and at the start of a new century, in search
of a new life; her second marriage coincides with the resurgence of
Egyptian nationalist politics and a revitalized mood for independence
and democracy. Ninety years later Isabel Parkman sets out to Egypt
to reconnect the two branches of the al-Baroudi/al-Ghamrawi line,
against the background of domestic Egyptian, Middle Eastern, and wider
international political conflict.
Like Strange Music, this is a story of severed cross-cultural/racial family
relations, recovered through personal documents, the imaginative work
of the central narrator, and the echoes of the original love story in the
relationship between Anna’s American-born great-granddaughter Isabel,
a 35-year-old divorcee, and Sharif’s Palestinian-Egyptian great-nephew
‘Omar, Amal’s brother.78 An eminent conductor, Palestinian rights advo-
cate and cultural critic as well as a man twenty years her senior, ‘Omar
al-Ghamrawi is transparently modelled on Edward Said (whose
Orientalism, and postcolonial theory more generally, provide an epis-
temological backdrop to the novel).79 When she consults him about
her discovery of Egyptian papers among her dying mother Jasmine’s
possessions, he suggests that she visit his sister Amal in Egypt. In the
process of reading Anna’s diaries and translating her sister-in-law Layla’s
notebooks, Amal moves from the position of biographer and researcher
to that of a narrator engaged in weaving together a story from multiple
strands. Thus chapter 13, which follows Anna’s and Layla’s accounts
of their first encounter, presents us with an unmediated narrative not
drawn from the diaries, in which Layla, working on embroidery, shows
Anna the particular stitch she is using (149): an apt metaphor for the
creative work of the writer (Amal, representing Soueif), who ‘stitches’
together epistolary narratives, first and third-person accounts, telephone

Race and Empire 93
conversations, factual historical documents, chapter epigraphs from a

wide range of sources (Egyptian, Arabic, English literature throughout
the ages, Victorian literature, world literatures, including quotations
from political and social commentators who feature as characters), and
a mythic/supernatural interlude.

The embroidery metaphor is extended in the image of the tapestry:
Jasmine’s trunk contains part of a larger wall-hanging, a triptych Anna
mentions weaving in her diary as her ‘contribution to the Egyptian
renaissance’ (403), with the three panels depicting the ancient
Egyptian goddess Isis, her brother and lover Osiris, and their child
Horus (Soueif notes that the triptych also reflects the three religions,
ancient, Christian, and Muslim, as well as the lovers-sister triad repli-
cated in each time period).80 With its classical motif and inscription
from the Qu’ran (‘It is He brings forth the living from the dead’, 491,
516), the triptych represents the continuity of the past in the present: a
continuity reflected, romantically, in the two love stories, the children
they produce (the second Sharif, child of Isabel and ‘Omar, is the great-
great-grandson/great-nephew of Sharif al-Baroudi), and the incestuous
undertones of Isabel and ‘Omar’s relationship (‘Omar discovers that
Isabel’s mother was the woman with whom he once had a passionate
love affair, and fears that he might be Isabel’s father). Political continui-
ties are manifest in the turn-of-the-century and end-of-the-millennium
nationalist struggles for internal democracy and independence from
imperial control. Artistically, the principle of continuity is embed-
ded in the composition of the text and its three principal narrators
(Amal, Anna, Layla). If Anna’s tapestry stands for the writing process,
it also emblemizes intercultural communication: when Layla and Anna
exchange their first words in Sharif’s house, where Anna, in the guise
of a young Englishman, is held captive by two young nationalists,
the flow of their conversation – in French, their shared language – is
compared to weaving (135). Weaving metaphors recur whenever Amal
reflects on the narrative process (136, 255, 299).
In the course of her fictional reconstruction of Anna’s experiences,
Amal’s sense of reality becomes submerged by the intense inner life the
story and its central characters assume in her imagination: Anna, she
writes, ‘has become as real to me as Dorothea Brooke’ (26). Anna not
only turns into a fictional character; she comes to represent the paradig-
matic heroine of the Victorian realist novel. Why Dorothea? Like George
Eliot’s protagonist in Middlemarch (1871–72), Anna is both an insider
and an outsider to her society: Dorothea because of her deep yearning
for a purposeful life dedicated to social reformism, of meaningful and

94 Neo-Victorianism
profound thought transcribed into writing and transformative action;

Anna because of her quest for new horizons, a life beyond the safe
boundaries of upper-class English society, her openness to other cultures,
her sensual delight and adventurous spirit. Dorothea’s intellectual and
social reformist vision and Anna’s experiential, transcultural, and anti-

imperialist impulses are shared by Amal, who after the breakdown of her
marriage has led the life of a recluse, confined to her Cairo flat, always
waiting for a phone call or visit by one of her sons. To Amal her life in
Britain, in ‘a house out of a Victorian novel’ (45), is just as lost and yet
as palpably real as is Victorian fiction; as is her late-Victorian ancestor
and heroine Anna. Imagining Anna, tracing her journey into a fulfilled
cross-cultural marriage, writing about her family life enables her to work
through her own failed marriage. In imagination her identity merges
with Anna’s as she dreams of ‘lying in the courtyard of the old Baroudi
house . . . with Nur [Anna’s and Sharif’s daughter] sitting by my head
tugging at my necklace when I think to look in on my sleeping children.
With Nur on my hip I go into the house and upstairs to the boys’ room
in our house in England and there they lie’ (406). Her dream life also
amalgamates the two romantic couples (she sees herself lying in Sharif’s
arms, feeling relief at the knowledge that he is not her father [446]).
Isabel, in her turn, begins to confuse reality and imagination when she
refers to Sharif’s house as ‘The one in the story – I mean the one in the
journals’ (203).
If Anna appears a variant of the Victorian heroine in quest of her iden-
tity, a cross between Eliot’s mid-Victorian Dorothea and the intrepid and
adventure-bound New Woman of the fin de siècle (a generation which
brought forth many women travellers),81 then Sharif, as he is presented in
Anna’s journals, represents the ‘dark, enigmatic hero of Romance’ (254–5):
an Orientalist fantasy Soueif encourages and then deconstructs by turn-
ing Sharif into a complex political character.82 A passionate advocate of
national liberty, he desires an intellectual equal for his wife; a Byronic
hero in looks, he is a John Stuart Mill in thought and action. Like Mill,
Sharif adds clauses to his marriage contract repudiating his rights over his
wife: if Mill felt it his ‘duty to put on record a formal protest against the
existing law of marriage . . . and a solemn promise never in any case under
any circumstances to use [his powers]’,83 Sharif implements equal divorce
rights and a pledge of monogamy. Anna and Sharif further reflect Mill
and Harriet Taylor in combining a love match with a working partner-
ship in which they support each other and co-author political writings.
In the figure of Sharif Soueif exposes Western cultural and literary fantasies
of the depraved Muslim despoiler of Western virgins, the ‘wicked Pasha

Race and Empire 95
who would lock you up in his harem and do terrible things to you’ (153),
as explored in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings (such as Thomas
Rowlandson’s The Pasha)84 and pornography (photography,85 and fiction
such as The Lustful Turk, see our discussion in Chapter 3).
Not only is Anna’s imagination free from such cultural stereotypes, she

also, rather unconvincingly, feels no sense of apprehension when she is
abducted. In the story of her first husband’s depression and guilt-stricken
death following his involvement in Kitchener’s Sudan expedition of
1896–98, and by later making Anna a witness to the Denshawai/Dinshawi
affair of 1906, Soueif illustrates that it is not the ‘Pasha’ but rather the
Western imperialists who wreak barbarity on the innocent. In 1906, at a
pigeon-shooting party, five British officers intruded into a village, anger-
ing the villagers by shooting at their birds; in the ensuing skirmish a gun
went off, wounding five of the inhabitants, including a woman; the offic-
ers were threatened by the villagers, one of them died of sunstroke, and a
local man who had tried to help was beaten to death by the soldiers arriv-
ing on the scene. In the subsequent show trial four men were sentenced
to execution and eight condemned to be publicly flogged, while others
were given harsh prison sentences. The savagery of the British response
to a conflict that had been triggered by imperial officers in the first place
caused widespread consternation in Britain, hastening the resignation of
Lord Cromer.86 The poet and Egyptophile Wilfrid Blunt (featured briefly
in the novel), who in 1882 had supported the uprising led by Urabi
Pasha, organised a public campaign to end occupation.87 George Bernard
Shaw made ‘The Denshawai Horror’ and his indictment of the British
Empire central to his ‘Preface for Politicians’ (1907).88
The ground for this climate of fear and brutal reprisals was prepared
by a fake letter purportedly originating from Egyptian nationalists but
in reality concocted by the Oriental Secretary, Harry Boyd,89 with the
collusion of Cromer, who sought to persuade the Foreign Office to
authorize a greater use of force by producing ‘evidence’ of a planned
nationalist uprising. The baroque excess of the letter’s mimicry of the
‘language of the East’ 90 acts as a further reflection of the Orientalist
fantasies of the imperial rulers: the missile is awash with linguistic and
stylistic absurdities.91 Published in 1965, Clara Boyle’s book, with its
celebration of the ‘great pleasure’92 involved in the composition of a
document instrumental in encouraging bloodshed and the colonial
imposition of terror, illustrates the continuity of Western cultural
imperialism in the modern period.93 It is with rising anger that Amal
reflects on Boyle and his ‘wife’s confidence – not in some long-ago for-
gotten time, but in the Sixties, in the Sixties when I was alive – that he

96 Neo-Victorianism
had put his finger on and had actually expressed “the workings of the
oriental mind”94 – my mind’ (494, emphasis in original). The novel thus
serves to educate Western readers to a recognition of the persistence of
cultural prejudice, the fierceness of which, as Soueif describes in the
opening essay of Mezzaterra (2004), makes ‘people with an Arab or a

Muslim background living in the West . . . [do] daily double-takes when
faced with their reflection in a Western mirror’.95 In sharp contrast to
Boyle’s Orientalist fantasmagoria, Soueif has her contemporary charac-
ters discuss the etymology of Arabic words, drawing attention to the
maternalist, quasi-feminist roots of political and religious terms. This,
alongside Anna’s reflections on what ‘real’ harem life is like, provides
a counter-narrative to the Orientalist construction of Arabic language,
life, and culture.
As Said famously argued, Orientalism, with its ‘ontological and episte-
mological distinction made between “the Orient” and . . . “the Occident”’,
produced the Orient ‘politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically,
scientifically’, to the extent that ‘no one writing, thinking, or acting
on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations
on thought and action imposed by Orientalism’.96 For all her lack of
prejudice, this also applies to Anna in her initial stage as a British tour-
ist and member of the expatriate community in Egypt. Though she
feels alienated by the attitudes of Boyle and other functionaries and
much more at ease with Egyptophiles like James Barrington, the third
Secretary, and Mrs Butcher, a broad-minded vicar’s wife, her first letter
home is, as Amal comments, ‘a little self-conscious, a little aware of
the genre – Letters from Egypt, A Nile Voyage, More Letters from Egypt . . .
Perhaps she was thinking of a future publication’ (58).97 Initially at
least, Anna’s response to Egypt is filtered through the mirror of Western
travelogues, letters, and memoirs. Like Lucie Duff Gordon she stays
in Cairo’s Shepheard’s Hotel, invokes the Arabian Nights to describe
her experiences (67, 134, 137), and in her cross-dressing escapades
imitates not only the New Woman but also a Bedouin woman traveller
described in Duff Gordon’s letters.98 Just as her interest in Egypt was first
prompted by art – John Frederick Lewis’s paintings of Arabic domestic
interiors – so the voices of her literary predecessors appear to her to
possess a far greater degree of authenticity than those of the repre-
sentatives of the Empire: ‘I cannot help feeling that the letters of Lady Duff
Gordon give a truer glimpse into the Native mind than do all the speeches of
the gentlemen of the Chancery’ (107).99
Literature, art, and writing are key to Anna’s experience and sense
of identity: like Amal’s this is a story about a writer-in-the-making.

Race and Empire 97
When she is held captive, her immediate focus on noting her thoughts
down greatly unnerves Sabir, the servant abducted with her (a version
of Duff Gordon’s Omar). Even before her friendship with the al-Baroudis
she begins to lay claim to a literary voice and vision of her own, sending
a sketch and pencil drawing to her father-in-law, Sir Charles (an out-

spoken critic of empire), which satirize the British expatriates reclining
in the shadow of the Great Pyramid and pronouncing on the Oriental
mindset. Her awareness of the analogies in gendered, classed, and racial
hegemonies and the way these shape social and intercultural interac-
tion is indicated in her depiction of the scene. Only the English gentle-
men are ‘lolling at their ease’ (97), at the centre of the tableau, supremely
oblivious to any threat to their position. Nor do they take notice of
the servants, Emily and Sabir. The latter is, however, fed bits of food by
Barrington just as Toti the dog is by Boyle. (Barrington is a sympathetic
character in the novel, the only Englishman in Egypt to remain in touch
with Anna after her marriage and who supports Egyptian independ-
ence; his relationship with his manservant is, however, ambiguous and
potentially exploitative in its sexual undertones.) In contrast to the men
the lady, Mrs Butcher, appears painfully conscious of her constraints,
‘sitting very upright on a cushion in a neat dress of grey with navy trimming
and a well-restrained bonnet’ (97). Emily, Anna’s English servant, who is
in Egypt under duress, signals her discomfort as well as her subaltern
status by sitting ‘in one corner looking away from the party’, while Anna,
the observer, herself occupies ‘another with my sketching-pad poised on
my knee’ (97). The life force in this tableau derives not from the frozen
positions and postures assumed by the English characters, but from the
Egyptians, placed a short distance away, who
sit (or crouch or squat) quietly for some stretch of time, and you begin to
imagine that nothing can move them from their seeming placidity – until
suddenly there is a murmur and there are movements and men standing up
and arms waving and raised voices and then it all subsides again into quiet,
the peace and the restiveness alike being incomprehensible to me[.] (97)
The ‘inscrutability’, pace Homi Bhabha,100 of the ‘natives’ calls for instant
self-assertion on the part of the colonial masters; thus one of the
Englishmen begins to ‘hol[d] forth on the subject of the “effendis” whom he . . .
dislikes intensely for . . . their attempts to emulate us. He derides their golf
collars and two-tone boots, their “undigested” championing of European ideas
of liberty and democracy. He is suspicious of their French education’ (97).
Intriguingly, while the Egyptians present are servants, their proximity

98 Neo-Victorianism
and energy direct the imperial gaze to those ‘other’ Egyptians, the
educated elite and indigenous ruling class, the intellectuals from which
the nationalist movement draws its inspiration and its leaders. Here the
adoption of ‘English’ values, above all the impetus for democracy and
self-government, is disparaged as seditious and implicitly associated

with the terror of the French Revolution.
In contradistinction to the representatives of colonial power, Anna
becomes more sensitized to the subject position of her own ‘subaltern’
and starts to reflect on Emily: ‘I wonder whether it is possible for a conquer-
ing nation to truly see into the character of the people whom he rules. How
well, in fact . . . do I know Emily?’ (99). If in all the twenty years she has
served as Anna’s maid Emily has always been ‘keeping her distance and
pinching herself a little space’, would she ‘bloom and open into more vivid
life’ in a cottage of her own and in possession of an independent income
(99)? These thoughts are pursued further by Amal, who feels frustrated
by Emily’s persistent silence and Anna’s failure to engage on any deeper
level with her: ‘How old is she? What does she want for herself? . . . Can
she yet do what Hester Stanhope’s maid did, who . . . caught the fancy of
a passing sheikh but was denied permission to marry him?101 Would she
do what Lucy [sic] Duff Gordon’s Sally did and melt into the back streets
of Alexandria, pregnant with the child of her mistress’s favourite servant,
Omar al-Halawani?’ (68). While the fallaheens’ voices resonate in the
novel, Emily remains the silent Other, the subaltern whose voice and
perspective are unrepresentable. When Anna informs her of her mar-
riage and offers her a choice between continuing in her service, albeit
in a very different context, and leaving her employment and returning
to England, ‘she was cross with me . . . although she did not betray it except
by a slight tightening of the lips’ (323), and opts for the latter. If Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s maid is given a voice and a life by Barrett Browning’s
biographer Margaret Forster (in her 1990 novel Lady’s Maid), Soueif’s
fictional lady’s maid is dispossessed even of a surname and fades into
oblivion: an intriguing application of Spivak’s subaltern theory to the
English maidservant.
Emily’s fate of being erased from history was suffered in real life by
Sally Naldrett, the English servant who accompanied the consump-
tive Duff Gordon to Egypt in 1862. Naldrett’s relationship with Omar
Abu Halaweh, Duff Gordon’s dragoman, was discovered, dramatically,
when on Christmas Eve 1864 she gave birth on a boat travelling up
the Nile.102 Duff Gordon was outraged at what she perceived as an
unpardonable betrayal; in 1855, Barrett Browning, in process of writing
her epic of cross-class sisterhood, Aurora Leigh (1856), had responded

Race and Empire 99
similarly ‘shocked’ and ‘pained’ to the news of the (freshly married)

Elizabeth Wilson’s imminent confinement.103 However progressive,
in theory, their views were on class or race relations, Victorian female
middle-class intellectuals and writers like Duff Gordon and Barrett
Browning were incapable of moving beyond a near-feudal conception

of ‘their’ servants.104
While she delivered the child and begrudgingly oversaw the couple’s
marriage (Omar was already married, and Sally was left in no uncer-
tainty about her status as an adulteress), Duff Gordon cast doubt on
Omar’s paternity to justify her harsh treatment of Sally and leniency
towards him.105 The disgraced maid and her infant were dispatched
speedily, with instructions that Abdullah be handed over to Omar’s
first wife, and Sally return to Britain. Duff Gordon’s biographer, how-
ever, surmises that Naldrett may have remained in Egypt.106 This is
the scenario Pullinger explores in The Mistress of Nothing, which ends
with Sally’s intercultural competence and bilingualism enabling her to
secure an upwardly mobile position from maid to tourist advisor in an
upmarket Cairo hotel. The difficulties she initially experiences in her
struggle for survival illustrate the imperial control the British lady exerts
over her servants, English and Egyptian, even beyond their employ-
ment: Sally is dismissed without a reference, and thus forced to accept
poorly paid work in disrespectable establishments (she narrowly escapes
a worse fate); Omar is forbidden to offer her a home with his family,
even though his parents and first wife wish to do so;107 Sally’s appeals
to Egyptian acquaintances are to no avail. Ironically, in her own micro-
cosm Lucie thus reflects aspects of the despotic regime of the Pasha she
so disparages.108
The novel examines the way in which rigid English class divisions
become porous in the contact with another culture, but are then rein-
stated with a vengeance. As Lucie settles into her life in Egypt, acclima-
tizes to Egyptian culture and social intercourse, and begins to learn the
language, she starts dispensing with English decorum, and encourages
Sally to do likewise, discarding gloves, boots, stays, European dress and
codes of behaviour. If Lucie dons the comfortable clothing usually worn
by men, Sally, like Soueif’s Anna, revels in the anonymity and mobility
Arabic women’s dress bestows on her; ironically it is Lucie who points
out that ‘You never know when we might need you to be able to move
freely through the city without being seen to be European . . . to pass
as Egyptian’.109 The conditions of travel and their domestic circum-
stances erode social distances,110 establishing an intimacy that would
be unthinkable in Britain. Substitutes for the family Lucie had to leave

100 Neo-Victorianism
behind, Sally and Omar share her meals, and Lucie even gets into the
habit of brushing Sally’s hair, playfully reversing the positions of mistress
and maid.
It is only in preparation for a reunion with her husband that her
hybrid condition becomes a matter of concern to Lucie: ‘I’m neither

English, nor Arabic; I’ve been a kind of creature in between. I look a
kind of man/woman’ (115). When, while she is still reeling from the
shock of desertion,111 Sally reveals an entirely unexpected, and fulfilled,
life of her own, Lucie responds with extreme severity. Pullinger suggests
that Lucie is primarily motivated by a sense of her own loss (3–4). As
Catherine Wynne argues, however, Duff Gordon’s dismissal of the
mixed-race child as ‘hideous’112 indicates her rejection of the hybrid
family she had helped create: ‘The son of Sally and Omar exposed the
limits of Gordon’s intercultural encounter. . . . [B]y disciplining Sally . . .
Gordon was policing the boundaries of empire and gender and purg-
ing her Egyptian home of the more visceral dimensions of cultural
interaction’.113 Ultimately, Pullinger’s Sally realizes that she has never
been ‘fully human’ to Lucie, but only ever ‘part of the background, the
scenery . . . a useful stage prop’ (3). Pullinger here charges her fictional
character with the lack of imagination and sensitivity for which the
historical Duff Gordon censored European travel writers, among others
Harriet Martineau: ‘the people are not real people, only part of the scen-
ery to her, as to most Europeans’.114 Here, too, then the English maid is
placed in direct correlation to the ethnic, subaltern ‘Other’. The fictional
Sally challenges this conceptualisation by repeatedly confronting Lucie;
she never succeeds in effecting a single acknowledgement.
In Soueif’s novel Anna displays a greater sense of awareness of and
sympathy towards her maid’s constraints, but she, too, is indifferent
to her inner life. This is intensified by Emily’s rejection of Egypt and
silent, yet palpable, resistance to Anna’s explorations. Like Sally to Duff
Gordon, Emily acts as a reminder of Anna’s transgressions against nor-
mative English feminine behaviour. Both women’s responses to Egypt
are born from Orientalism; but where Emily’s mind is filled with fears
of abduction and the white slave à la Ingres’ Odalisque à l’esclave (68),
Anna’s vision is of the ‘luminous beauty’ (27) of the play of light and
shadow in Lewis’s paintings.
When she encounters these very vistas in the al-Baroudi house, she
is instantly and permanently captivated. Her night-time glimpse of the
harem interior, with its ‘high windows and recessed divans, rich hangings
and a tiled floor leading with dainty steps to a shallow pool’ (108), is a
reminder of Lewis’s The Reception (Figure 2.1).115 On awakening she is

Race and Empire 101

Figure 2.1 John Frederick Lewis, The Reception (1873), oil on panel © Yale Center
for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / Paul Mellon Collection / The
Bridgeman Art Library
presented with a near-replica of his Siesta (Figure 2.2):116 ‘I had slipped

into one of those paintings . . . There above me was the intricate dark wooden
latticework and beyond it a most benevolent, clear blue sky . . . [T]here, across
the room, and on a divan similar to mine, a woman lay sleeping . . . Her skin
was the colour of gently toasted chestnut, and she lay on cushions of deep
emerald and blue, and the whole tableau was framed, yet again, by the lattice
of a mashrabiya’ (134).
Anna believes herself transported into both a Lewis painting and the
Arabian Nights, and starts composing her own ‘Arabian’ tale about the ‘fair
occupier of the opposite divan’; ‘it seemed so odd just to sit there – in one of my
beloved paintings, as it were, or one of the Nights of Edward Lane. I took the
same pleasure in my gentle jailer that I would have done from those’ (137).117
As the world of art and the imagination is ceding place to a new-found
reality and she is invited into the al-Baroudi family, her long-standing
sense of alienation, born from her unhappy marriage and the tragic death


Figure 2.2 John Frederick Lewis, The Siesta (1876) © Tate, London 2009
of her husband, begins to lift. Now that she is becoming part of a new,
very different community, the world of the Europeans takes on an out-
landish, quasi-Oriental character. When on her trip to the Sinai, dressed
and veiled as an Egyptian woman, she observes, undetected, a group
of English acquaintances at the train station, they strike her as ‘exotic
creatures, walking in a kind of magical space, oblivious to all around them’
(195). In her transformation from Oriental tourist to adoptive Egyptian
she embraces harem life, whose reality she finds very dissimilar from the
Western imagination. The al-Baroudi harem is an extended family with
close female networks to other households: communities which encour-
aged and enhanced women’s interactions whereas traditional family
structures in the West isolated them from each other.118 As Ruth Bernard
Yeazell has pointed out, Western ‘collective fantasizing’ constructed a
homogeneous image of ‘the harem’, drawn from ‘lore about the Grand
Seraglio and atmospheric trappings freely borrowed from the Arabian
Nights’. Distinctions only came to be noted when Western women travel-
lers gained access to Eastern homes; yet ‘the very fact that [they] repeat-
edly recorded their disenchantment with actual harems, announcing over

Race and Empire 103
and over again how little the reality of Eastern domestic life met their
expectations, testifies to the continuing power of the imaginary harems
they had inherited’.119
Acutely aware as she is of the prejudices and fantasies she once in
part shared in her fascination with the sensuality of Arabic domestic

interiors, Anna discovers in herself ‘a strange unwillingness to provide a
detailed picture of “life in the Harem”’ (354). Her endeavour to persuade
her English friend Caroline to come for a visit proves unsuccessful.
Instead Anna becomes a member of the Arabic New Woman move-
ment, recording her friendship with feminist activists such as Zeinab
Fawwaz (237)120 and Malak Hifni Nasif (355),121 with whom she plans
to set up a women’s journal with French and Arabic editions: ‘the
idea is to compare the conditions and the aspirations of different women in
different societies – it is not to confine itself to the “Question of Women”
but to enter into matters of more general concern and so demonstrate that
women are ready to enter a wider arena’ (355). The first factual Egyptian
women’s magazine, Al-Fatah (The Young Lady), had been founded
a decade earlier, in 1892, and defined itself, pace Hind Nawfal, ‘as a
scientific, historical, literary, humoristic magazine concerned with
[the female] sex . . . It . . . will discuss . . . the condition of woman’.122
The turn of the century saw the emergence of a range of women’s
magazines, some of which, like the journal in which Anna and Layla
become involved, had a wider political agenda. These publications,
Sonia Dabouss notes, ‘began to demonstrate a mounting awareness in
print of Egyptian national identity and the need for improvements in
women’s status’.123 The al-Baroudi women, along with their friends,
also implement and contribute to a women’s lecture series in the
newly established university co-founded by Sharif.124 Soueif recreates
a vibrant atmosphere of social reformism, left-wing thought, and
feminist debate which anticipates the radical and sexual politics of the
1960s, in which Amal and her circle of intellectuals and activists came
to maturity. The text highlights that, crucially, the emerging Egyptian
feminist movement of the early twentieth century had powerful allies
in the nationalist leadership: thus the sheikh who conducts Anna’s and
Sharif’s Egyptian wedding, Mohammed ‘Abdu, a historical figure, had
advocated women’s rights in his newspaper (al-Waqa-ea al-Misriya,
Egyptian Events) since the 1880s,125 and with his disciple, Qasim
Amin, the author of The Liberation of Women (Tahrir al-mar’a, 1899)
and The New Woman (al-Mar’a al-jadida, 1900),126 leads a discussion
in the al-Baroudi house to which the women listen from the balcony
(375). This scene offers an implicit comparison with the condition

of women in Britain: there, too, women were listening intently from

balconies (Parliament), but the men were significantly less amenable
to consider their rights.
In the process of enculturation Anna thus moves from the Orientalist
observer, adventurer, and travel writer to the politically committed

nationalist-feminist journalist. After Denshawai her writing becomes
focused on the struggle for Egyptian self-government. The text explores
the interconnection between nationalism and feminism as a catalyst of
women’s entry into the public sphere: as the al-Baroudi and al-Ghamrawi
households start hosting mixed-sex political events involving foreign
visitors, traditional principles of segregation are being superseded by the
politics of liberation. Anna becomes Sharif’s collaborator and English
voice; by translating his French articles for the British periodical press
she establishes a platform for the Egyptian independence movement
in the heart of empire. Her aspiration to represent ‘an Egyptian who
would address British public opinion in a way that it would understand . . .
Someone who could use the right phrases, employ the apt image or quotation,
strike the right note and so reach the hearts and minds of the British people’
(399) is thus realized, briefly, and brought to completion eight decades
after Sharif’s assassination by their great-nephew ‘Omar and the influ-
ence his political writings exert on Western thought. The ending of the
novel, with its uncertainty about ‘Omar’s own fate, brings the map of
inter/transcultural personal and political relationships and the cycle
of destinies full circle. Whether Sharif the baby from ‘Omar and his
eponymous forefather, or Amal’s book manuscript from Anna’s story,
the living have, as in Anna’s tapestry, been brought forth by, and will,
it is suggested, continue the legacy of, the dead.
2.4. Conclusion
The legacy from the nineteenth century that the postcolonial neo-
Victorian novel confers on the reader has poignant political resonances.
A colonized country and people’s struggle for independence and social
democracy, the recurrence of imperial paradigms in different guise in the
twenty-first century, the rewriting of history from the erstwhile ‘subal-
tern’s’ point of view, the interplay of military, economic, religious, and
cultural expressions of colonial rule, the diversity of (proto)postcolonial
identities and subjectivities, giving rise to a hybridity of voices and strat-
egies of resistance: however disparate the four novels discussed in this
chapter, they share a central commitment to political revisionism. Each
draws on the leitmotif of the journey to explore narratives of personal

Race and Empire 105
and collective development, in which voyages into selfhood are made

possible by the close affective bonds and ‘maps of love’ created between
and across different cultures. In this journey to self-determination and
spiritual union with the cultural Other music plays a pivotal role: if
opera, in The Map of Love, unleashes pent-up emotion, enabling a griev-

ing process which ancient Arabic song is subsequently able to transmute
into an awakening to a new life, the song of the people, in Sea of Poppies,
generates a communal bond which transcends boundaries of caste, reli-
gion, race, and gender: the ‘strange music’ of voices thus fused together
into poetry forges a connection not only between the characters, but also
between the writer and the reader of postcolonial neo-Victorianism.

3
Sex and Science: Bodily
and Textual (Re)Inscriptions

[S]cientific representations of the feminine body are . . .
a constitutive part of wider social discourses that are
informed and shaped in their turn by economic, class,
and racial ideologies. . . . [T]easing out some of these
connections . . . suggest[s] how the fluid, symbolic res-
ervoir of cultural associations focused on the feminine
body operate[s] in scientific discourses to produce
historically specific material effects.
Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally
Shuttleworth, Body/Politics (1990)1
If the political re-visioning impulse of contemporary neo-Victorian

fiction has a key theme aside from race and empire, it is the interroga-
tion of gender and sexuality as constructed and regulated through the
discourses of science. In this chapter we investigate the continuing
appeal of that most ‘sensational’ aspect of the nineteenth century: its
politics of the body and the way that body was mediated through the
sexualized and scientific gaze. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and
Sally Shuttleworth have drawn attention to the ways in which scien-
tific approaches to the female body and female sexuality have always
been closely bound up with the politics of class and race. The cultural,
socio-political, and imperial implications of scientific constructions
of the sexed, raced, and classed female body are pivotal concerns of
feminist neo-Victorianism, which aims to interrogate the legacy of
historically specific paradigms in contemporary society. As Jeannette
King has pointed out, the return, in fiction, to Victorian women’s lives
and conceptualizations of gender ‘provides an opportunity to challenge
the answers which nineteenth-century society produced in response to
106

Sex and Science 107
the “Woman Question”’,2 enabling contemporary women writers to

probe the continuity of sexual and social configurations in the present.
Victorian sexuality and the way we re-imagine it, its contradictions,
excesses, dissimilarities from or correspondences with our diversity of
experience holds an irresistible appeal for the neo-Victorian imagination.

The nature of our interest in the Victorian body arguably reveals less
about the Victorians and more about our own preoccupations: Marie-
Luise Kohlke rightly notes that neo-Victorianism has ‘become the new
Orientalism, a significant mode of imagining sexuality in our hedonistic,
consumerist, sex-surfeited age.’3 In its least refined form the contempo-
rary fascination with ‘sex and crinolines’ reflects, as Christian Gutleben
has noted,4 a nostalgic fetishization of the taboo, the secret and forbidden
in a world of sexual over-exposure, a disingenuous belief in the radical
nature of a society no longer under the shadow of what Michel Foucault
in 1976 conceptualized as the ‘repressive hypothesis’.5 As we discuss in
Chapter 6 in relation to costume drama, dressing up a twenty-first-century
body in Victorian attire not only bestows the illusion of capturing, if
fleetingly, the physicality of the past, but also carries the promise of
reviving the lost thrill of disrobing in the contemporary. The subsequent
‘uncovering’ of the Victorian body mimics the scandalous disclosures
of Victorian society (lurid divorce cases, male brothels frequented by
prominent public figures,6 organized female child abuse and under-age
girl trafficking).7 This culture of scandal interconnects with the culture
of exhibition: the Victorian preoccupation with the collection, display,
and scopophilic objectification of ‘other’ bodies and races is reflected
in today’s Big Brother culture of (sexual) exhibitionism. Readers of neo-
Victorian novels like Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White
(2002) and viewers of the TV adaptations of Sarah Waters’s novels are
encouraged to indulge in the fantasy of savouring what a Victorian pros-
titute ‘really was like’ or what ‘actually happened’ in lesbian encounters
before the sexual liberation of the 1970s (on the contemporary TV screen
lesbian sex is still coded as faux heterosexuality).8 A marketing tool which
plays to the sexual immaturities of our age, the neo-Victorian body can, in
more sophisticated textual constructions, serve to address contemporary
identity politics by ‘mainstreaming’ gay coming-out-stories (as Waters’s
novels do). It can also be used to scrutinize the instabilities of modern
sexual categorizations rooted in Victorian sexological conceptualiza-
tions, such as transvestism and trans/intersexuality, then understood
to be synonymous with homosexuality: an example here is Patricia
Duncker’s novel James Miranda Barry (1999) about Britain’s first female
doctor, who rose to pre-eminence in male disguise.9 Our academic

interest in rediscovering our radical roots in Victorian cultural and

socio-political discourse is undercut in plots which expose radicalism as a
guise for sexual libertinism and gendered, classed, or raced exploitation:
thus in Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998) the upper-class editorial board of
the factual late-Victorian feminist journal Shafts is engaged in the lesbian

abuse of working-class women, and in Belinda Starling’s Journal of Dora
Damage (2006) female abolitionism and male anarchism are implicated in
the pornographic objectification of women and black men.
At its most complex, metafictional, and ironic, neo-Victorianism
explores the inscription and textuality of the desire to repossess the
Victorian by performing a slippage between the central character and the
text, between a physical body and the textual corpus. In late-twentieth-
century fiction like Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) the insta-
bility of the heroine’s body stands in for the illusionary character of the
neo-Victorian novel itself, the ‘Cockney Venus’ Fevvers’s publicity slogan
‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’10 providing a tongue-in-cheek comment
on the ever-frustrated desire about authenticity that neo-Victorianism
invokes. In post-millennial literature it is frequently the discovery of
a corpse which performs this metaphoric exchange: Gyles Brandreth’s
Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (2007) draws on the criminal
enquiry into a gay murder to enact a multiple process of Wildean
recovery through pastiche and parody, while Kate Summerscale’s nov-
elistic crime study, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), involves the
modern reader in the investigation of mid-Victorian child murder in
the middle-class family and through its play with the generic conven-
tions of fiction, biography, reportage, and crime investigation pinpoints
the instability of any attempt at arriving at ‘truth’ claims about the past.
The metonymy of the female body acting as a ‘cover’ (covering) of the
text and the gendered and raced subject’s effort to break free from physical
and textual strangleholds is most strikingly accomplished in The Journal
of Dora Damage, in which a female bookbinder starts by recycling female
garments and accessories for the covers of ladies’ diaries, only to find her-
self indentured into the pornographic book trade. This is represented on
the cover of the novel with the image of a female torso tied into a corset
(Figure 3.1): the act of opening and reading the book is thus pictorially
associated with the loosening of the laces and the stripping of a faceless
woman’s body of her clothed ‘bindings’. That these ‘bindings’ might be of
a sexual nature is implied with the allusive reference to ‘Damages Bindery’
providing ‘Bindings of any kind’ to satisfy specialized tastes. The chilling
conclusion of the novel, which sees the heroine narrowly escape the fate
of being made over into a book cover herself, constitutes an apt metaphor
for the neo-Victorian project of textual (and sexual) re-embodiment.

Sex and Science 109
Figure 3.1 Paperback cover of Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage
(London: Bloomsbury, 2007), reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury
Publishing

3.1 Scopophilia and paratextuality
Our focus in this chapter is on three post-millennial novels by

women which problematize nineteenth-century – and, by inference,
contemporary – sexual, textual, and scientific inscriptions of the gen-

dered, classed and raced body: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus
(2003), a version of the neo-slave narrative11 set in the Napoleonic
period of the 1810s but extending to the years 1860 and 2002;
Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006); and Starling’s Journal of Dora
Damage. In our discussion of these texts we will be guided by feminist
approaches to science, the body, pornography, and the gaze, in particu-
lar Emily Martin’s investigation of the objectifying gaze of nineteenth-
century science and its emphasis on observation, evaluation, and
visualization,12 Londa Schiebinger’s exploration of the ways in which
scientific racism and sexism combined in constructing the black female
body,13 Susan Griffin’s examination of pornography’s ‘sacred images’,14
Laura Mulvey’s neo-Freudian concept of the scopophilic gaze,15 and
Lisa Sigel’s interrogation of the mid-Victorian scientific turn towards
pornography as a development coincidental with the professionaliza-
tion of science and symptomatic of its imperial objectives.16 The word
pornography first came into usage in English in the early Victorian
period;17 by the 1860s, the time in which Harris’s and Starling’s novels
are set, pornography had become the province of an elite male scientific
culture.18 In our discussion of neo-Victorian feminist fiction’s recon-
ceptualizations of nineteenth-century science, the body and pornog-
raphy we draw not on the post-feminist notion of pornography as an
‘expression of erotic possibility within the realm of fantasy’,19 but on
the radical feminist definition of thanatica (degradation and violence as
the structuring principles of a drive towards death) as opposed to erotica
(sexually explicit material which depicts the pleasure of the participants
without acts of coercion or objectification),20 an approach embraced by
the texts. Charlene Senn’s further differentiation between ‘Sexist and
Dehumanizing’ (conventionally termed ‘soft’) pornography with ‘no
explicitly violent content’ (but which ‘may imply acts of submission or
violence by the positioning of the models . . . costuming . . . or by set-
ting up the viewer as voyeur’)21 and its hardcore violent extension illus-
trates the three stages of Dora Damage’s ‘apprenticeship’ from erotica
to ‘non-violent’ but degrading pornography (which, while leaving no
traces on her body, starts to affect her mind) to, finally, the explicit
threat of pornographic mutilation being enacted on her body and that
of her daughter. That the dividing line between ‘hard’ and ostensibly

Sex and Science 111
‘soft’ forms of pornography is permeable is demonstrated by Hottentot

Venus: here the dehumanizing gaze and its subsequent pictorial and
sculptural representation are exposed as (scientific) rape.
Harris’s title highlights the Foucauldian theme central to all three
novels: the way in which individuals and their bodies are disciplined

into discourses of power through ‘observation’, the term pointing to
the controlling gaze of institutions and individuals equipped with
institutional power, and how this power is reproduced in textual
form.22 However, the use of the plural – The Observations – hints at the
possibility of subverting the gaze and its textual inscriptions by altering
the positions of observer and observed. This ambiguity is also reflected
on the UK covers of Harris’s and Chase-Riboud’s novels. A self-conscious
play with paratextuality, in Gérard Genette’s sense, is an important fea-
ture of these novels, and indeed, of most of the neo-Victorian fictions
examined in this book; their cover images, titles, epigraphs frequently
serve the purpose of a ‘threshold . . . a “vestibule” that offers [readers]
the possibility of . . . stepping inside . . . a zone not only of transition
but also of transaction’.23
The Observations (Figure 3.2) features a young woman in the process of
opening a book while glancing sideways, as if to ensure that she will not
be surprised in what appears to be a furtive act. As we cannot see her eyes,
our attention is drawn to her hands: metonymically, the image directs us
to the slippage between an individual and her social status, the protago-
nist’s hands and her economic position as a ‘hand’. Hands, literally and
literarily, played a crucial part in the social and libidinal organization of
Victorian life.24 The slim book in the woman’s hands adds to the synec-
dochic structure of the cover in that it embodies her mistress in the form
of her notes and ‘observations’ on the domestic servant class. Reading
(and misreading) is a central preoccupation in the novel, as is implied in
Mrs Reid’s name: she likes to ‘read’ her maids’ minds, who, as the cover
indicates, respond by reading her and her observations in turn. The loose
papers visible at the back of the notebook contain the clue to what ‘really’
happened to the young woman’s predecessor, a maid who came to a tragic
end on a railway line. The conjunction of title and cover thus draws our
attention to the gaze and its relation to processes of reading and – via the
loose sheets – writing, while at the same time destabilizing the position
of the reader-as-observer, hinting at the subversive possibilities of return-
ing the gaze. Similarly, the cover of Hottentot Venus (Figure 3.3) directs us
to the subject of the novel – the objectifying gaze to which the ‘exotic’
(hinted at in the incoming sailing boat and the palm leaves) is subjected
and with which racial hegemonies are established and maintained – by

Figure 3.2 Hardback cover of Jane Harris’s The Observations (London: Faber and
Faber, 2006), reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Sex and Science 113
Figure 3.3 (Paperback) jacket cover of Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud

(New York: Random House, 2003), used by permission of Doubleday, a division
of Random House, Inc.

guiding our attention towards those engaged in this process of specular

dehumanization: the diverse audiences that flocked to see the spectacle of
the Khoisan or Khoekhoe/Khoikhoi (South African tribal) woman brought
to London in 1810 and exhibited as ‘the Hottentot Venus’25 in British and
Parisian freak shows until 1815.

The visual emphasis on four spectators on the left-hand margin of
Chase-Riboud’s cover enacts an intertextual reference to a contempo-
rary French cartoon (Figure 3.4).26 It also implicates us, the reader, in
this appropriatory gaze, hinting at our own complicity in processes
of objectification and commodification. The object of this prurient
voyeurism, Sara/Sarah/Sa(a)rtjie Bartmann/Baartman(n) herself,27 is
depicted on the back cover of the novel, in an aquatint of 1811 which
pictures heavy tribal paint like a facial mask (Figure 3.5). The image
highlights the correlation between racial and sexual abuse. The paint/
mask upsets even as it claims to sustain the illusionary ‘authenticity’
of the tribal outfit, pinpointing the artificial and pornographic nature
Figure 3.4 ‘Les Curieux en extase ou les Cordons de souliers’, colour print
showing Sarah Baartman ‘on show’. Original engraved by J. Hopner (1814?),
reproduced by permission of Museum Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa
(Museum Africa Accession No. MA1974–625)

Sex and Science 115
Figure 3.5 Frederick Christian Lewis, ‘Sartjee the Hottentot Venus, Exhibition at
No 225, Piccadilly’ (1811) © The British Library Board (C.191.c16)

of the act. It simultaneously draws attention and denies access to the

face (in Chase-Riboud’s novel it is Sarah herself who insists on wearing
a mask during her public performances, thus asserting a degree of
agency). The mask protects the individual against the glare of the audi-
ence, while simultaneously turning her into a generic representation of

African womanhood. The covering of the face with its attendant invita-
tion to speculate about what might lie beneath acts as a metonymy for
that other part of the Khoisan female physiognomy which attracted the
obsessive-compulsive curiosity of European audiences, ethnographers
and scientists (the elongated labia of the mythical ‘Hottentot apron’ or
tablier represented figuratively by the apron covering the pudenda).
Hottentot Venus makes for painful reading because the real-life Saartjie
Baartman’s individuality and human dignity were violated in life and after
her death in 1815. Her skeleton, body cast, preserved brain, and pickled
genitals were displayed in the leading French scientist Georges Cuvier’s
Muséum d’Histoire naturelle after being written up in his treatise on her
autopsy.28 Baartman’s skeleton and body cast were later exhibited in the
Musée de L’Homme in Paris until feminist protests in the 1970s led to their
removal to a storeroom.29 Following lengthy negotiations between the
South African and French governments, Baartman’s remains were returned
to South Africa and buried on National Women’s Day in August 2002.30
If Baartman and her body were the object of voyeuristic and porno-
graphic racial speculation for almost two centuries, The Observations
provides a more comforting account of the empowering potential of the
gaze when appropriated by the object of observation.
3.2 Subaltern subversions: Jane Harris’s

The Observations (2006)
In this novel narrated by the ‘Other’ of Victorian fiction,31 the prosti-

tute, the fourteen-year-old Irish Bessy Buckley in flight from her pimp
(her mother) takes employment in a rundown rural estate in the vicin-
ity of Glasgow where, despite the bizarre treatment she encounters, she
becomes attached to her mistress, the twenty-year-old Arabella Reid. As
Bessy discovers when secretly reading her mistress’s notebook, Mrs Reid
is engaged on writing a treatise on domestic servants in the style of
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management,32 crossed with a scientific
study of the particularities of the servant species:
Had we an account of the nature, habits and training of the domestic

class in my time and details of particular cases therein, no history

Sex and Science 117
could be more useful, but it strikes me that such matters are rarely
heeded and that what knowledge we have remains within the realm
of personal experience. It were to be wished that some good author
would make his observations on the subject during his time so that
the knowledge could be passed down . . . In the absence of such an

author, I humbly offer the following theoretical discourse and case
studies. Those servants I have lived to see myself I wish to remember
and note down in these pages, both for my own use and for the
elucidation of others. (72)
Mrs Reid here follows the tenets of contemporary science which, as Martin
points out, historically constructed vision – observation – as the primary
means of attaining ‘objective’ knowledge: ‘The emphasis on observation,
on mapping, diagramming and charting, . . . meant that the “ability to ‘vis-
ualize’ a culture or society almost bec[ame] synonymous for understand-
ing it.”’ The ‘objectifying and limiting’ aspects of this scientific ‘visualism’
only came to be challenged in the later twentieth century.33 In the period
in which Harris’s novel is set, observation was considered essential to the
scientific project. Mrs Reid’s notes on the domestic servant appear inspired
by Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851), which also
focused on a particular group of working-class subjects (impoverished
streetsellers and dwellers) with the aim to establish hitherto unknown
‘facts obtained by positive observation and investigation’.34 Following
Mayhew’s lead, Mrs Reid establishes the servant genus as a different ‘race’
(one that in Mayhew is explicitly associated with ‘Hottentots’), scientifi-
cally to be studied, measured, and categorized into separate sub-divisions
through the tools of phrenology and ethnography.35
Seeking as she does to identify and classify scientifically the physical
markers and character traits, and best training programme for the pro-
duction, of the ‘ideal’, most consummately obedient and loyal servant,
Mrs Reid embarks on idiosyncratic experiments which involve issuing
arbitrary commands. She proceeds to study her maids’ physiognomies,
takes cranial and body measurements (a feature common to nineteenth-
century scientific literature, and particularly prominent in criminal
studies36 and dissection reports37), and in an employment centre even
attempts to examine the stools of applicants. The methodologies and
discourses of contemporary science, when purloined by the young wife
of a lawyer and aspiring MP are, unsurprisingly, interpreted as a sign of
madness. Her manuscript is consigned to the flames (where it is
retrieved by Bessie, to be later misinterpreted as a male-authored satire
by a publisher). Yet Mrs Reid’s experiments are no more eccentric than

the haphazard treatment by means of which her husband and the

family doctor seek to restore her to mental health: the latter obsessively
examines her stool for external, physical markers of insanity, and writes
her up as a case study to further his career.
In contrast to the indifferent scientist, Mrs Reid is interested in her

‘subjects’ and vigorously pursues their education. Like the real-life Arthur
Munby towards his secret maid-of-all-work lover and later wife, Hannah
Cullwick,38 she commissions her maids to write down their observations
of their daily life while herself keeping a diary of their habits,39 admires
Bessy’s strong arms (58), and encourages her to dress up as a lady (59–60).
Nor does her desire for social cross-dressing stop with her servants;
Bessy is shown photographs of Mr Reid ‘in pirate togs with a cocked hat
on his head and a sabre in his hand’, while Arabella herself poses both
‘as a dark-skinned princess of the Orient, draped in a robe with a sash
at her waist and a pitcher balanced on her hip’ and as an ‘old-fashioned
maid’ crouching at the feet of her master (242–3): Mrs Reid mimics Julia
Margaret Cameron’s photography40 while also engaging in the role-
playing games Munby devised for Cullwick, modelling her alternately
as slave and lady, Magdalene and young man.41 If for Munby, as Anne
McClintock has noted, ‘the irresistible lure of working women was that
in watching them he could voyeuristically enjoy the masculine traits
he coveted, without endangering his own socially prescribed sense of
maleness’,42 Mrs Reid, the middle-class lady without a purpose, uses
her power over her maids to experiment with the subject positions
of scientist, teacher, mother, and child. While ostensibly setting out
to breed absolute submission, what she enjoys most is the subversion to
which she herself aspires and which she ultimately attains only in mad-
ness. In the diaries she commissions a mere list of tasks fulfilled is not
satisfactory; what she wants to see is a record of her maids’ feelings and
reflections: an inscription of her own unacknowledged inner life dis-
placed into that of her servants. By prompting her to articulate a (fabri-
cated) version of self which anticipates her desires she encourages Bessy
to become an observer herself, an upwardly mobile reader responsive to
literary lessons of self-help (gleaned from the pages of Dickens’s Bleak
House and Great Expectations), and a writer in her own right, with the
effect of undermining the imperative of obedience she otherwise seeks
to inculcate. This obedience led to the demise of Bessy’s predecessor,
the Irish maid Nora. Bessy initially speculates that Nora was hit by a
train because she was too literal-minded in following her mistress’s
commands, but later discovers that Nora committed suicide after being
dismissed by Mr Reid when she disclosed her pregnancy.

Sex and Science 119
The concept of observation and the scientific gaze is here appropriated

by women across the class-divide: by the frustrated upper-middle-class
wife in quest of a meaningful occupation (before her marriage Arabella
aspired to a philanthropic teaching career) and by the domestic servant,
otherwise the subject of scrutiny and investigation. While Bessy is much

more sharply observant than anybody else in the book (she infers Nora’s
pregnancy from passages in her diary) and succeeds in manipulating her
employers’ gaze for her purposes, the middle-class wife is unable to gain
any authority from her mimicry of scientific methodologies. Her escape
from captivity ends with a violent attack on the vicar (the man who had
raped and impregnated Nora), after which she is committed to a private
psychiatric hospital, where she happily settles into recording the antics
of fellow-patients. The maid, by contrast, comes into her own in the
course of her studies of the master class. The book we read constitutes
Bessy’s spirited analysis of gendered class relations in Victorian rural
society, in the city, and in the madhouse, as well as an unsentimental
account of child sexual abuse and prostitution. When her past threatens
to catch up with her in the shape of her mother Bridget, intent on
reclaiming her as her primary source of income, Arabella’s final bout of
violence releases Bessy from maternal sexual exploitation while binding
her all the closer into her own service (in the tussle between the two
women, each of whom wants to retain control of Bessy, Bridget is pushed
off the railway bridge under an oncoming train). Rather implausibly,
Arabella’s madness has the effect of securing Bessy’s lasting devotion
despite her being the cause of her mother’s gruesome death. Bessy blames
herself for causing Arabella’s breakdown and precipitating the chain
of events by staging ghostly visitations in order to punish her for her
objectification of her. ‘I was no more than a “thing” to Arabella, a thing
that might be experimented upon, toyed with and cast aside at a whim
when it had outgrown its use’ (102), she rages after reading her case study
of ‘Bessy (The Most Particular Case of a Low Prostitute)’, written after
Arabella’s discovery of Bessy’s antecedents.
However resourceful Bessy proves in manipulating her employers
(Arabella’s nerves are shattered by her invention of Nora’s spectre, and
after his wife’s breakdown James Reid becomes entirely dependent on
her), her one attempt to break free from her internalized servitude is
short-lived. While asserting her independence through physical work,
she remains defined by and beholden to the master class’ gaze. Thus
her book is addressed to unspecified ‘gentlemen’, the governors or
medical directors of Arabella’s lunatic asylum, where Bessy has found
employment as a kitchen maid and attendant. Positioned alongside

the ‘gentlemen’ of the textual address, the reader by inference becomes

associated with the madhouse keepers. As if to garner the approval of
the ‘gentlemen’, Bessy announces her intention of taking up writing for
good. Earlier in the story we are shown her expertise in capturing the
imagination of different audiences: her mistress, for whose delectation

she records the naïve thoughts of the dutiful maid; and male drawing-
room society, whom she entertains with bawdy songs (one of her ballads
is purloined and turned into a bestselling broadsheet by a neighbouring
poet afflicted with writer’s block). The Observations suggest that, if only
they are feisty enough, working-class women are able to appropriate the
mistress’s tools; disentangle themselves from the master’s observation,
however, they can not.
3.3 Race, science, and the gaze: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s

Hottentot Venus (2003)
The inescapability of the objectifying gaze and its textual inscriptions is

the focus of Hottentot Venus. This is not the first response in fiction to
the case of Saartjie Baartman. Apart from the contemporaneous French
Vaudeville one-acter La Vénus hottentote, ou haine aux Françaises (1814),43
traces of the cultural myth of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ can be found in
Charlotte Brontë’s inarticulate and animalistic Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre
(1847), Thackeray’s ambivalent representation of Miss Swartz in Vanity
Fair (1848),44 Baudelaire’s cycle of ‘Vénus Noire’ poems in Les Fleurs du Mal
(1857), Angela Carter’s repartee, ‘Black Venus’ (1985);45 and possibly in
Olive Schreiner’s black girl Sartje in From Man to Man (1926).46 The rise of
feminism and postcolonialism in the later twentieth century led to fuller
explorations from a black female perspective: Grace Nichols’s Fat Black
Woman’s Poems (1984),47 Elizabeth Alexander’s ‘The Venus Hottentot’
(1990),48 Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus (1990),49 and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s
Story (2000). As Wicomb’s modern protagonist remarks – problematically,
as the narrator clarifies through her omission of parts of the story – ‘One
cannot write nowadays . . . without a little monograph on Baartman; it
would be like excluding history itself.’50 Most recently, photographic por-
trayals, by Lyle Ashton Harris and Renée Valerie Cox (‘Venus Hottentot
2000, 1995’) and Ingrid Mwangi (‘Static Drift’, 2001),51 have been com-
plemented by Zola Maseko’s documentary film (1999)52 and the publica-
tion of two biographies, which illustrate the mythologizing power of the
subject even in a fact-finding project: Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully
(2009), while problematizing the temptation to fictionalize Baartman,
start their book with a list of ‘Dramatis Personae’,53 and Rachel Holmes

Sex and Science 121
(2007) dramatically merges the identity of Baartman’s early master with

that of a later manager at a crucial moment in her story.54 Both biogra-
phies at times move in the direction of historical biofiction. Even the
‘real’ Baartman is largely a product of the imagination.
Twentieth and twenty-first-century responses situate Baartman within

a complex framework of racial, sexual, colonial, and scientific discourses.
There are at least seven interrelated contexts within which the public and
scientific display of Baartman needs to be placed: imperialism; ethno-
graphic influences on cultural constructions of black women; scientific
scopophilia and the pornographic gaze; racial categorizations; cultural
practices of collection and exhibition; abolitionism; and the ethics under-
lying museum collections. In the first instance, Western imperialism’s
territorial expansionism found its scientific counterpart in the invasion
and appropriation of the racially ‘other’ body. Anne Fausto-Sterling
asserts that the ‘colonial expansions of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries shaped European science; Cuvier’s dissection of Bartmann was
a natural extension of that shaping.’ Cultural stereotypes of a ‘hidden
Africa’ were mirrored in the fascination with discovering and laying bare
the ‘hidden’ genitalia of the African woman. 55
Secondly, ethnographic and literary representations since the
seventeenth century of Khoisan or Khoikhoi/Khoekhoe sexuality and
the female body gave rise to the cultural climate that would later pro-
duce the spectacle of the ‘Hottentot Venus’; thus Susan Iwanisziw draws
attention to dramatic representations influenced by Richard Ligon’s 1657
True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados.56 Thirdly, by the time
Baartman arrived in London in 1810 bodily traits like a large rump in
black female subjects had come to be pathologized as a physiological
disorder (‘steatopygia’)57 which provided visual markers of racial qua
sexual aberration: the buttocks and the purported hypertrophied labia
of Khoikhoi women were taken as proof of the sexual atavism of the
black races. The cultural fixation with buttocks acted as a displacement
of the genitalia and also reflected anxieties about homosexuality,58 while
the idea of a female genital appendage fed into contemporary fantasies
about hermaphrodites and intensified fears about uncontrolled female
clitoral sexuality.59 Anthropological and criminological studies by Buffon,
Lombroso, Ferrero, De Blasio and Hildebrandt drew analogies between
racial inferiority, sexual degeneracy, and social deviance by seeking traces
of steatopygia or irregular genital development in the prostitute’s and
female criminal’s,60 lesbian’s,61 or nymphomaniac’s body.62 This in turn
encouraged the literary and artistic iconography of the prostitute as a
‘Hottentot’.63 The criminological interest in sexual pathology, combined

with the imperial sexual gaze and the colonial politics of conquest, led
to the conceptualization of the black female corpse as the epitome of
abjection and pornographic or, in Hortense Spiller’s terms, ‘pornotropic’
obsession. Pornotropy, Spillers argues, is an essential aspect of slavery:

1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive
sensuality; 2) at the same time . . . the captive body reduces to a thing,
becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position,
the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression
of ‘otherness’; 4) as a category of ‘otherness,’ the captive body trans-
lates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical
powerlessness that slides into a more general ‘powerlessness’ . . .64
The extreme commodification of black women’s body parts illustrates

this process of abjectification. As Holmes and Sadiah Qureshi note,
‘the breasts of Khoisan women made into souvenir pouches were kept
as trophies by Europeans’,65 and ‘Khoikhoi women were treated as
taxidermic material, their skins stripped and stuffed to preserve them
as specimens of the anomalous’.66 The dismemberment of the African
body was so profoundly ingrained as a valid ‘scientific’ undertaking in
the Western psyche that even a committed anti-imperialist like Olive
Schreiner, who passionately promoted the human rights of the black
population in South Africa, was able to comment in a letter to a friend
that she had had an inspiration for one of her novels while ‘writing an
article on the Bushmen and giving a description of their skulls’.67
Imperial science constructed racial difference simultaneously in
sexual and in animalistic terms. The fourth context for Baartman’s expe-
rience is the categorization of the African, specifically the Khoikhoi, as
sub-human. Scientific studies drawing on ethnography had long been
concerned with establishing the Khoi people as occupying the lowest
rung of humanity with the San or ‘Bushman’,68 thus representing a link
between human and primate. As Londa Schiebinger points out, the
Linnaean concept of the Great Chain of Being was central to scientific
theories of race in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: ‘This
doctrine postulated that species were immutable entities arrayed along
a fixed and vertical hierarchy stretching from God above down to the
lowliest sentient being.’ European scientists, intent on finding evidence
of this chain, embarked on comparative dissections of humans and
animals and the study of skeletons: in their search for ‘transitional
forms bridging the gap between animals and humans’ they ‘settled on
the ape, and especially the orangutan . . . as the animal most resem-
bling humankind’, while constructing Africans as the ‘lowest’ race of

Sex and Science 123
humans. Since women were ‘seen as sharing similar deficiencies when

measured against a constant norm – the élite European man’, the black
woman became the paradigm for everything that was ‘Other’.69
Fifthly, Baartman’s experience exemplifies the nineteenth-century
‘culture of display’ which witnessed the widespread collection and

exhibition of exotic animals (as in London’s Liverpool Museum man-
aged by William Bullock, who declined to exhibit Baartman but felt less
compunction about displaying Laplanders a decade later).70 Baartman’s
economic value, Qureshi emphasizes, lay in ‘her perceived uniqueness
as a rare live specimen of the exotic.’71 Like the wild animal she was
dressed up to resemble, she was subject to proddings and baitings by
spectators.72 The exhibition of animals correlated with that of exotic
peoples as emblems of imperial conquest and proved a particularly
lucrative form of public amusement; the display of Baartman was
followed between 1822 and 1853 by that of Esquimaux (as explored
fictionally in Andrea Barrett’s Voyage of the Narwhal, 1998), Native
Americans, San (‘Bushmen’), ‘Aztecs’, and Zulus.73 Their entertainment
value was closely connected to the popularity of freak shows exhibiting
human ‘curiosities’ such as dwarfs and living skeletons; human and
animal exhibits often shared the same floor space.74
A sixth context is the political background of abolition. The sensation
Baartman caused arguably cannot be attributed to her singularity status
as a black subject: there was a sizeable black population in London at the
time,75 and black performers enjoyed a considerable degree of visibility.
Rather, Baartman prompted intense political interest because her arrival
followed shortly after the abolition of the slave trade in the British
Empire in 1807, thus coinciding with abolitionist efforts to extend the
law to achieve the emancipation of all existing slaves (a goal not real-
ized until 1833).76 Contemporary political cartoons exploited the link
between abolitionism, Whig politics, and the spectacle of the Hottentot
Venus by depicting Lord Grenville (the leader of the ‘Broad Bottoms’)
entering into a business arrangement with Baartman.77 A court case
initiated in 1810 by the African Institution to release her from public
viewings and repatriate her attracted enormous attention and was dis-
missed when Baartman bore witness to the consensual nature of her
career as an entertainer78 and its financial rewards.79 Hendrik Cesars,
who had been compromised as Baartman’s slave master, was replaced
by Alexander William Dunlop; after Dunlop’s death in 1812 Baartman
came under the control of a new manager/owner, Henry Taylor.
Lastly, even though Baartman’s body has been laid to rest, Baartman’s
case throws into relief the ethical dimensions of museum collections
and the ways in which they ‘encode racialized ideologies by claiming

to provide privileged and objective views into a people’s lifestyle’.80 The

continuity of this racialized gaze rationalized with reference to scientific
and educational endeavour was illustrated in a museum exhibit that
toured the US, Australia, and Britain in 1992. The installation, entitled
‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit’, involved the display, inside a

golden cage, of a couple purportedly originating from an obscure island
represented by a map and faked Encyclopedia Britannica entry. The pair
was shown carrying out traditional domestic tasks and declared willing
to undertake other optional activities for a fee. As Qureshi records, ‘Many
paid the requisite fee to view “primitive” genitalia or watch the ritual
dance, some walking away when their expectations of “authenticity”
were unfulfilled. Others . . . assumed positions of control and superior-
ity, some even hurling abuse or sexually harassing the pair. Many par-
ticipants, after realizing that the performance was not an “authentic”
display, became angry and upset . . . castigat[ing] the exhibitors for their
“immoral” deception of the public.’81
Given these multiple contexts, the case of Baartman has been read
as a paradigmatic signifier of scientific and cultural pathologies of race,
gender and sexuality: a ‘unifying symbol’ for the South African nation.82
Her experience, as Zoë Wicomb argues, ‘neatly exemplifies some of the
central concerns of postmodern thought – the inscription of power in
scopic relations, the construction of woman as racialized and sexualized
other; the colonization and violation of the body; the role of scientific
discourse in bolstering both the modernist and the colonial projects’.83
The danger of this approach, Quereshi affirms, is that Baartman’s ‘lack
of agency, and politicization contribute to the risk of re-establishing
her as a curiosity’.84 It is this agency and the individual behind the cul-
tural icon that Chase-Riboud seeks to recover and, in Morrison’s terms,
re-member, just as in her earlier historical novel, Sally Hemings (1979,
followed by The President’s Daughter, 1994), she re-memorized the titular
slave woman’s life-long relationship with Thomas Jefferson, author of
the American Declaration of Independence, her owner, and the father
of her slave children.
In Hottentot Venus Sarah decides to leave her Khoekhoe community
for servitude in white Cape Town after she has lost her entire immediate
family, with both her parents and her husband and child having fallen
victim to a series of white massacres. It is only by braving the hostile gaze
of white society that she believes she can retain her immunity from that
society’s irredeemable brutality. Chase-Riboud confers a level of choice
where the factual Baartman most likely had none. An 1814 French
newspaper interview claimed that Baartman was abducted on the eve of

Sex and Science 125
her wedding celebrations after her father and fiancé had been killed by
marauding troops.85 Indentured life was rather more prosaic: Baartman
was traded, separately from her family (she had six surviving siblings),86
from one employer to the next. While Chase-Riboud’s protagonist seeks
out a white employer, the real Baartman was sold by the Dutch farmer

Cornelius Muller to a Free Black, Pieter Cesars (Peter Caesar in the novel),
who purchased her on behalf of his German employer, Jan Michiel
Elzer; after his death she came into Pieter’s possession and subsequently
worked for his brother Hendrik Cesars as a nursemaid and domestic
servant.87 The complexities of black-to-black exploitation (the Cesars,
descendants of slaves themselves, had slaves as well as servants)88 are
polarized into white racism and male sexual abuse in the novel, where
from her first encounter with a white employer Sarah is subjected to
sexual harassment with the full collusion of white women: the mission
nun tactfully leaves the room to allow Caesar to prod her bottom, expose
himself and threaten her with his demand of sexual services. White
female complicity continues in the Caesars’ home when her mistress,
revolted by Sarah’s body glimpsed after a bath, reveals its particularities
to her brother-in-law Hendrik, who rapes her within earshot of the fam-
ily. Some years later Hendrik is persuaded by Dunlop, an explorer, naval
surgeon, and adventurer, to embark on a joint money-making venture
by taking Sarah to London (in real life, the debt-ridden and illiterate
Cesars was pressured into a bogus contract by Dunlop, a staff surgeon at
the Slave Lodge, who had probably seen one of the performances Cesars
arranged for Baartman at the military hospital and come to conceive of
her as the solution to his own pecuniary difficulties).89 Sarah consents
to the scheme because she is in a relationship of sorts with Dunlop and
believes his promises of marriage, and because she cannot see a possible
future for herself in her country.
As in The Observations Sarah’s internalized acquiescence with the
master’s rule was initiated in childhood and early adolescence by the kind
treatment of a slave master, thus forever merging the positions of master,
friend, and father in the heroines’ mind: Mr Levy, to whom the thirteen-
year-old Bessy was sold as a sexual slave by her mother, taught her to
read and write, gave her a literary education, and encouraged her every
whim, while the Reverend Freehouseland, the missionary who pur-
chased Sarah from her aunt and named her, did not even expect sexual
favours and instilled in her a deep conviction in the moral inviolability
of contracts. Once entered into, an agreement, even only verbal, was to
be considered binding in the eyes of God and by the laws of personal
integrity: ‘All contracts were sacred . . . They represented one’s given

word, which was the very essence of Englishness and English faith.
The word of a gentleman. And the word of Christ. . . . A debt was to be
honoured’ (19). This provides a psychological context for Sarah’s other-
wise incomprehensible loyalty to Dunlop, a man who makes no effort to
feign an attachment; it furnishes an explanation for her collusion with

Dunlop and Caesar during the court case, while the written contract
that is hastily drawn up may explain her acceptance of Taylor and even
her self-destructive submission to the sadistic animal trainer Réaux, to
whom Dunlop and Caesar sell her at the gambling table before Dunlop
departs on the Beagle (an ironic reference to Darwin’s later voyage of
discovery).90 By that stage Sarah is additionally bound to Dunlop in
marriage.91 A woman’s position in marriage under English law is inferior
even to that of the ex-slave. As her friend Alice declares, ‘He at least had
to pay you as his servant, and as his slave you could claim your free-
dom on English soil. As his wife, you are nothing except his property’
(183). Chase-Riboud is here drawing on prominent late eighteenth and
nineteenth-century feminist arguments for marital reform to end the
legal quasi-slavery of wives. Sarah’s belief that every contract represents
a moral pledge prevents her from absconding from Réaux, whose régime
becomes intolerable when he subjects her to the ignominy of a cage on
stage and to the violence of the scientific gaze.
Chase-Riboud explores the way in which Sarah’s psychological
allegiance to colonial authority, resulting at it does from childhood
indoctrination, makes her resistant to the abolitionist cause, not least
because the court case brought against her will constitutes yet another
exhibition which pulls record crowds. For this reason she insists on
being ‘a free woman! I am not a criminal. I am not a slave. I am not
a prostitute or an immoral person’ (149–50).92 The abolitionist offer
of protection appears to her as yet another attempt at appropriation
(and, indeed, the African Institution was compromised by financial
irregularities and other dubious practices).93 Consequently she charges
the mixed-race abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, who in the novel
instigates the hearing, with exploiting her for his own purposes: ‘You
see me as yours, as much yours as Master Dunlop sees me as his. You see
me as a means to your goal of revolution, and rebellion, against the
English. You are so angry you don’t really see me at all – only as an
object . . . I don’t trust you, white black man’ (134). Tragically, she
fails to recognize their shared experience of racial oppression, and
conceptualizes him through her internalized colonial gaze: ‘I willed
myself not to understand. . . . I saw what whites saw, a crazy nigger
in Englishman’s clothes . . . waiting to pounce upon them with his

Sex and Science 127
poisoned spear’ (137). Joint racial provenance offers no grounds for

making common cause; rather, the friends on whose support she relies
are from the world of freak shows, social rejects like herself, above
all women: this is the community with which she shares her greatest
sense of identity. It is women who teach her to read,94 whereas, ‘con-

vinced . . . that books in general and the Bible in particular wouldn’t
talk to black folks’ (19), she had previously resisted even the teach-
ings of the Reverend Freehouseland. Now she takes note of her friend
Caroline’s assertion that ‘A book gets you out of the prison of your
mind. And to read is to write. And to write is to own yourself’ (163).
But write – and right – herself is precisely what Sarah is unable to do
once she is in the grasp of the scientists. The indignities she suffers as
an exhibit in freak shows are insignificant when compared to the cal-
culated brutality of the scopophilia to which she is subjected in Paris
at the hands of the scientific elite. In its extreme form scopophilia, the
pleasure of looking, as Laura Mulvey argues in her classical analysis of
twentieth-century film, can ‘become fixated into a perversion, produc-
ing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction
can come from watching, in an active, controlling sense, an objectified
other.’95 Chase-Riboud’s Cuvier resembles nothing so much as a scien-
tific Peeping Tom with more than a touch of Jack the Ripper. The three-
day ordeal of posing in the nude to Cuvier and his colleagues,96 all of
whom share his conviction of the inferiority and sub-humanity of the
black race, is carefully prepared by Chase-Riboud’s account of Sarah’s
first encounter with Cuvier at a high society event: ‘The unblinking
gaze of the doctor was as cold as ice and inspected me as if I had just
arrived in a crate. . . . It was the cold stare of a cobra, paralyzing with
fear before striking. I felt my chest being squeezed tighter and tighter
as if in a fatal embrace, one in which I recognized my own fate in help-
less horror. Oh Lord, this man’s a murderer’ (222). This sets the scene
for Cuvier’s scopic abuse of Sarah in the gardens of his Natural History
Museum, followed by his attempted rape at another society event, and
his subsequent dissection of her body. As Susan Griffin has argued, the
stripping of a woman’s body, one of pornography’s ‘sacred images’,
typically assumes the mythological dimension of the Arthurian quest
for the holy grail.97 Cuvier takes this one step further by elevating his
psychotic obsession with stripping Sarah’s body of its ‘apron’ into a
sacred text of science.
Chapter 18, which presents Sarah’s unwilling modelling as a scientific
peep-show, is narrated by a by-stander discomfited by his recognition
of her humanity, the sculptor Nicolas Tiedemann. (This character is

modelled on the real-life Nicolas Huet, one of Cuvier’s in-house staff

painters who produced a body profile of Baartman,98 and Frederick
Tiedemann, an abolitionist scientist who through comparative brain dis-
section disproved the theory that blacks bore greater resemblance to pri-
mates than to whites, arguing that any differences of ‘character’ were the

result of ‘slavery and inhuman treatment’.)99 In her Acknowledgements
Chase-Riboud notes that she based the racial pronouncements in this
chapter on verbatim quotations from Cuvier and other nineteenth-
century scientists, philosophers and politicians, including Jefferson,
Lincoln, Hegel, Darwin, Galton, Voltaire, Huxley, and Broca (319). The por-
nographic impulse that underlies the scientific obsession with Baartman
is reflected in Cuvier’s and de Blainville’s unsuccessful attempts to coax
or coerce her into permitting an examination of her genitalia; as in the
novel Baartman was offered money but categorically refused to expose her-
self.100 The real-life de Blainville’s gaze and exasperation with Baartman’s
resistance are in the novel projected primarily on to Cuvier, whose intro-
ductory speech to the other scientists in Chapter 18 is indebted both
to Cuvier’s dissection report of 1817 and to de Blainville’s 1816 report
to the Société Philomatique.101
The dehumanizing, deeply misogynist gaze of male science is also
apparent in Frédéric Cuvier (George Cuvier’s brother) and Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire’s Natural History of Mammals, the first volume of which
(1824) reproduces lithographs of Baartman’s nude body taken from
the Jardin des Plantes etchings.102 That Baartman features as the only
human exhibit in a book on mammals signals her classification as
sub-human, while the nature of her representation (the shadowing in
of the nipples with the effect of throwing them into greater relief) car-
ries distinctly sexual undertones. Pornographic scopophilia, or what
one might call ‘scopopornia’, is key to Chase-Riboud’s presentation
of Cuvier’s report of his autopsy of Baartman.103 While in his ‘Extrait
d’Observations’ (1817) Cuvier, like de Blainville, draws analogies
with primates, he depicts Baartman in more feminine terms than his
colleague, extolling the gracefulness of parts of her body, and com-
menting on her ease of dancing and singing ‘in the manner of her
country’.104 This eroticization of an individual whose body he then
proceeds to dissect manifestly turns the autopsy itself into the public
performance of an erotic act undertaken on an exotic subject, the
object of manifold fantasies. (Cuvier’s factual report did not so much
focus on Baartman’s sexual as rather on her racial features; he also
refuted some of the myths about the ‘Hottentot apron’ as a congenital
and pleasurable phenomenon.)105 Chapter 21 of the novel interweaves

Sex and Science 129
Cuvier’s report with the language of a circus performer crossed with

that of a pornographer:
There is nothing more famous in natural history than the Hottentot

apron, and at the same time, there is nothing that has been the

object of so much argument.106 . . .
. . . The baron had arrived at last at the place in Africa he wanted to
be, most wanted to possess. . . . I listened to him murmuring like the
litany Liberty, equality, fraternity, the litany Prepuce, pubes, pudendum,
lavishing the skill of a sculptor and the heart of a butcher to excise
the mysterious apron he was now free to explore without my consent.
Over my dead body. . . .
. . . Gentlemen, I have the honor to present to the Academy the
genital organs of this, my Venus Hottentot, prepared in a way that
leaves no doubt about the nature of her apron . . .107
. . . So, I thought, the soul is not located in the sex, for I feel noth-
ing now that it is gone, floating in a jar, labeled Hottentot Venus,
that circulates amongst the savants. (279, 281, 282, 283)
The fictive Cuvier’s textual address to the reader is disrupted by Sarah’s

observations, which has the effect of positioning us not alongside but
above Cuvier, exposing to close scrutiny not only the autopsied body but
also and especially the scientist’s disturbed mind and sexual violence.
(This is made particularly explicit in Cuvier’s feverish excitement reach-
ing its climax when he excises Sarah’s genitalia.) The reader is guided not
by Cuvier but by Sarah’s disembodied voice, which comments sardoni-
cally on the proceedings and vows to haunt the museum. And haunt she
does: just as in life she had released Cuvier’s imprisoned birds, so now
she brings about the grisly death of Réaux, wreaks vengeance on Caesar
and Dunlop, sets fire to Cuvier’s museum, and ensures the extinction of
his family before giving him the coup de grâce. Finally, Cuvier’s brain is
dissected on the same table and displayed in the same museum; in terms
of its proportion to body size it proves to be smaller than hers (309).
Cuvier and the other scientists’ speculations about the propinquity of
the Khoekhoe people to the orangutan are brought full circle forty-five
years after her death, when she observes the encounter between the
aged Tiedemann and Charles Darwin. The meeting of two generations
of scientists signposts the continued legacy of scientific racism in the
Victorian period. As Crais and Scully note, the ‘Hottentot Venus’s great-
est notoriety came with the spectacular proliferation of scientific racism
in the second half of the nineteenth century’, with Baartman typically

being cited as evidence of racial hierarchies.108 The depiction of the

Hottentot Venus as ‘grotesque’ also served to standardize as superior
European categories of aesthetic beauty.109 Thus in The Descent of Man
(1871) Darwin referred to steatopygia to illustrate the extreme diver-
gence in aesthetic sensibilities between ‘black’ and ‘white’ races: what

was venerated as a marker of beauty among the former was perceived as
deformity and disability in the West.110 In the novel Darwin’s own sim-
ian physiognomy, exploited by Victorian caricaturists, hints at racism’s
displacement of anxieties about the self onto the Other: while Cuvier in
his factual dissection report affirmed that he ‘had never seen a human
head more similar to those of monkeys’,111 Sarah’s ghost comments at
catching sight of Darwin that ‘I had never seen a white man who so
resembled an ape’ (292).
If Hottentot Venus gives us Sarah’s voice, this is of necessity a voice
disjointed, its fragmentation being represented by the chapters’ shifting
perspectives and the multiple voices placed alongside or in alternation
with hers: a device which pointedly draws attention to her constrained
agency (‘Just because I consent to this life doesn’t mean I choose it’, she
tells Wedderburn [124]). The fantasy ending in which she takes revenge
on the men who exploited and degraded her proffers a carnivalesque
element which seeks to explode the control exerted by the framing
strategies so evocative of her textual and sexual confinement. The objec-
tification to which the real-life Baartman was subjected and the role of
science in essentializing and rationalizing racial oppression are inscribed
into the epigraphs to each chapter, most of which are drawn from
Cuvier’s scientific writings. The chapter epigraphs are themselves framed
by the four parts of the novel (early life in South Africa; London; Paris;
afterlife and burial in South Africa), which are headed by extracts from
nineteenth-century European writers (Mary Shelley, Gustave Flaubert,
George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Alexander Pushkin). As Jane Austen puts
it in a fictive letter inserted in chapter 12, ‘What had I really felt, . . .
witnessing this cruel humiliation of one of my sex, but a secret . . . joy
at my own safety and invulnerability . . . I could never be she’ (159).112
The pastiche of Austen is unconvincing, but the implied reference to
Jane Eyre and Bertha’s function as Jane’s Other reinforces the message of
the novel’s framing devices: that white Western literature had a major
investment in the imperialist project113 which made the abuse of Saartjie
Baartman possible and continues to bolster racial hegemonies today.
The sexual and textual inscription of the female body through the
discourses of science and the politics of the gaze operate differently in
the two novels discussed so far. While in The Observations the disciplining

Sex and Science 131
gaze is subverted by the working-class heroine and re-directed towards

her own (limited) empowerment, Hottentot Venus problematizes the
potential for resistance and appropriation by the racial subject it serves
to control and subjugate, particularly if the gaze is wielded by imperial
male science with the pornographic purpose of objectifying, degrading,

dehumanizing and figuratively as well as literally dismembering the
black female body. Our final example, Starling’s Journal of Dora Damage,
provides a synthesis of Harris’s and Chase-Riboud’s approaches by
drawing on the plot of a Victorian female artisan’s struggle to break free
from the pornographic book trade in which she becomes entangled.
3.4 Reclaiming the (textual) body: Belinda Starling’s

The Journal of Dora Damage (2006)
In Dora Damage, too, the male gaze is harnessed to racial and sexual
violence and cloaked in the guise of science. As in Chase-Riboud, factual
contexts provide a backdrop to the fictional events: Starling’s Afterword
indicates that the upper-class gentlemen’s club which commissions book
covers for obscene and sadistic materials and conceals its toxic fantasies
(necrophilia, racist violence, rape, pedophilia, sexual mutilation, ritual
murder) behind Rousseau’s (in itself fraudulent) concept of the noble
savage,114 ‘Les Sauvages Nobles’, is based on the factual ‘Cannibal Club’,
an offshoot of the Anthropological Society of London with close links to
the Royal Geographic Society.115 Prominent members included Richard
Burton (who organized the club),116 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Richard
Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Charles Duncan Cameron, General
John Studholme Hodgson, Sir James Plaisted Wilde (Lord Penzance),117
Thomas Bendyshe and, as an associate, Frederick Hankey.118 Monckton
Milnes’s extensive collection of pornography was heavily indebted to
Hankey, pronounced ‘un fou, un monstre’119 by the Goncourt brothers
and ‘a second de Sade without the intellect’120 by his friend Henry Spencer
Ashbee, the editor of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877, published
under the pseudonym ‘Pisanus Fraxi’) and likely author of My Secret Life
(1888–94, published under the pseudonym ‘Walter’). Like Sir Jocelyn
Knightley in Starling’s novel, Ashbee donated his collection to the
British Library.121 Ashbee’s rebellious family is recreated in Dora and her
entourage: one of Ashbee’s estranged daughters became a bookbinder,
his son Charles an Arts and Crafts reformer and socialist, and his wife
took up feminism after initiating their separation.122 As in Dora Damage,
the Cannibals were involved not only in the consumption but also the
production of pornography.123 In her study of the club Lisa Sigel draws

attention to the conjunction of class privilege, Tory politics, imperialist

science, and ethnographic pornography, which ‘distinguished men from
women, white from black . . . [and] justified social and political distinc-
tions between those who studied and those who were observed’. Sigel
concludes that ‘As scholars, politicians, scientists, artists, and finally

imperialists . . . [t]hey contributed to the ethos of British society that
argued for immutable difference, and they used this ethos to create the
hierarchies of empire. Their fascination with these distinctions helped
construct sex and race as biological categories . . . [T]he pornographic
investigation of sexuality did not preclude the scientific; instead, they
complemented and intensified each other.’124
As Starling’s novel emphasizes, women, too, can be participants in
the commodification of others: Dora’s landlady Mrs Eeles, a satiric
version of ‘a Miss Havisham in black’,125 has a weakness for child nec-
rophilia, and the Ladies’ Society for Fugitive Slaves (probably modelled
on the Ladies’ London Emancipation Society, the first nationwide
women’s anti-slavery society, established in 1863),126 which is presided
over by the rebellious wife of Sir Jocelyn Knightley, Dora’s principal
client, exploits its freed slaves by exhibiting them in the semi-nude for
sensual delectation and in order for the ladies to indulge in rape fan-
tasies during private gatherings.127 Dora herself becomes an unwilling
accomplice of the club when, driven by economic necessity, she takes
on her husband’s bookbinding business after he is incapacitated by
rheumatism. Her initial commission is innocuous. But when he realizes
that his bookbinder is a woman, Knightley, aware of the opportunity
to stimulate the dulled imaginations of the club, begins to engage Dora
in a complex game of voyeurism and exhibitionism. It is at this point
that she is given her first commission for sexually explicit material.
After months of designing covers for increasingly disturbing books Dora
is caught in a police raid on Charles Diprose, Knightley’s agent’s busi-
ness in Hollywell Street (the hub of the erotic book trade in Victorian
England),128 and finds herself abducted and deposited at Knightley’s
house in the middle of a dinner party of Noble Savages. Here she recog-
nizes that her gaze, imagined and now manifested in the flesh, is part of
the erotic thrill for the men: ‘They were all there – for I had read their
diaries, their letters, their stories, and they knew it too, as they watched
me watching them’ (240). Knightley introduces her to the group as his
‘magnum opus. What a woman we have made of you!’ (235). Held in
the lascivious stare of the men, Dora grasps that, to them, her profes-
sional service has always been a sexual one, and feels disempowered
by her own gaze: ‘It felt tremendously improper for me to witness this

Sex and Science 133
male occasion; it somehow felt more shameful than anything I had seen
in any book . . . But I could not avert my gaze, and the men within,
too, stared back out at me, laughing in a fraternal code that sneered at
outsiders’ (239). Dora finds herself trapped in the scopophilic régime
Mulvey has described as pertaining to mid-twentieth-century film: ‘The

determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure . . . In
their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at
and displayed . . . Woman . . . holds the look, and plays to and signifies
male desire.’129 While Dora the spectator is looking ‘on’ and ‘in’, she can
never be the subject of the active and possessive gaze, having always
already been objectified and possessed in imagination by the men who
are watching her. There is no possible interchange, only the subjugation
of the one by the gaze of the others.
Neither is Dora a free agent in respect of her employment: when she
objects to certain commissions, Diprose informs her that she has ‘no
choice over what you do and do not bind’ (220). This lack of choice
is also reflected in Knightley’s idiosyncratic payment practices which
resemble those of the capricious lover more than the employer: feasts and
feminine fripperies, not money, initially at least, is what she receives in
return for her labour. Knightley’s gifts – a parasol, a tortoiseshell comb,
a fan, dresses for herself and her daughter Lucinda, dangerously high-
heeled boots she cannot wear – represent the body of the courtesan, and
it is this metonymic body which she then proceeds to work into her book
covers. Her function, she realizes, is to act as a living embodiment of the
sexual fantasies she enfolds in fitting covers: ‘I was one step away from
Mistress Venus with her birch rods’ (220). Like Sarah Baartman she is
approximated to, and judged by others as, a prostitute: the visits she
receives from a succession of men, both high and low-born (Knightley,
Diprose, his printer Pizzy, a brutish man easily mistaken for a pimp),
are misinterpreted by her neighbours and lead to her daughter being
shunned. If in Hottentot Venus Sarah decides to make the best of a bad job,
so too does Dora, directing her energies into the purification of insalubri-
ous matter by transforming it into aesthetically pleasing art: ‘To justify
my role as Mistress Bindress in the obscene underworld of the book trade,
I had to convince myself I was fashioning . . . the pearl and the grit in the
oyster; I was making something beautiful out of something ugly’ (163).
It is with this feminine aesthetics of decorative art – an art rooted in
women’s traditional needlework130 – that Dora originally set out on her
apprenticeship as a bookbinder. Inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s habit
of binding her brother’s poems in her old gowns (70),131 and in anticipa-
tion of the surrealist artist Mary Reynold’s imaginative use of domestic

accessories in the 1920s to 1940s,132 Dora recycles the paraphernalia

of the household goddess: her mother’s silk dress, cushions, ribbons,
earrings. The text affords an ironic perspective on a Victorian woman
artisan whose economic constraints effect an alignment of her work
with a materially more comfortable middle-class aestheticism. Evocative

of the Pre-Raphaelite art of the time,133 Dora’s book designs also carry
resemblance to the patterns, textiles, and printing innovations of the
Arts and Crafts movement. The crucial difference is that Dora is pen-
niless and must make do with the materials she has on hand; that she
does so successfully bears witness to her talent. Her failure to thrive as a
housewife stands in marked contrast to the skill with which she masters
the craft of bookbinding.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Dora’s expertise in feminizing this traditionally
masculine trade prompts marital discord and the threat of union action
for breach of the prohibition to employ women as binders. Dora is here
cast as a representative of the increasing numbers of women entering the
bookbinding industry in the mid-Victorian period and the concerns
this raised among male trade union members. Indeed, local factions in
the London Society of Bookbinders exerted considerable pressure on
individual employers as late as 1874 (the year which saw the establish-
ment of the national Society of Women Employed in Bookbinding) to
dismiss women workers on the grounds of wage competition and cheap
labour.134 Starling’s novel exposes the lack of union protection and
absence of viable alternatives in Victorian women’s economic struggle
for survival: as she is neither a widow nor a fallen woman but a working
mother in search of a living wage and an occupation which will allow
her to look after her epileptic daughter at home, no benevolent organiza-
tion will consider her for support, and she is faced with the stark choice
of ‘workhouse or whorehouse’ (45). This is what keeps Sarah Baartman
chained to her ‘keepers’ (193). It is because of women’s vulnerable posi-
tion on the job market and the sexualization of their work that Dora
falls into the hands of the Noble Savages. Her imaginative adaptation of
a version of écriture féminine, her very aptitude in ‘writing the body’ in
creating book covers out of feminine accessories, inevitably attracts the
attention of Knightley and is purloined for pornographic purposes: ‘Just
as some colours flatter particular complexions, and some bonnet styles
suit certain shapes of head’, she is told, ‘so too must you consider the
colours and styles of your binding according to the nature of the book’
with the aim ‘to arouse and induce a . . . carnal, rather than cerebral,
reaction. . . . [I]t is the responsibility of you, the binder, so to clothe texts
for me, the bibliophile, in suitably pleasing habillé’ (113–14).

Sex and Science 135
Knightley’s own ‘habillé’, the multiple guises in which he chooses to

present himself, is pointedly unstable. A three-way cross between Chase-
Riboud’s Dunlop and Cuvier and the real-life Richard Burton (with whom
he shares, among other things, his spear-wound),135 and with ironic
undertones of Austen’s fatherly protector/lover, he is, at turns and simul-

taneously, an adventurer, scientist, ethnographer, imperialist, racist, wife-
abuser, who nevertheless treats Dora as his intellectual equal and suffers
bouts of kind-heartedness at the least expected moments. A pornographer
with violent proclivities who prides himself on his ‘collection of clitorises
pickled in glass jars, along with the renowned “Hottentot apron”’ (238),
he steps in to save the life and bodily integrity of the woman who
threatens to ruin him. His most prized possession is a manuscript Dora
is instructed to bind in what she is told is ‘Imperial Leather’ (342) and
later discovers to be human skin (the remains of a Hindu woman the
‘knightly’ imperialist rescued from the funereal pyre). And yet the same
man proves a skilled and humane doctor who brings indispensable medi-
cal relief to Peter’s rheumatism and Lucinda’s epileptic fits. This does not
stop him, however, from menacing Dora with subjecting Lucinda to a
clitoridectomy. Meant to excise independent female sexuality, Victorian
clitoridectomies were indeed rationalized with reference to epilepsy
(as well as hysteria and ‘self-abuse’).136
Knightley’s linguistic versatility, ethnographic learning, medicinal
knowledge, and sexual curiosity are evidently modelled on Burton
(1821–90), who, if he did not sport a body tattoo in order to pass as a
native, underwent a circumcision in preparation for his pilgrimage
to Medina and Mecca, during which he successfully impersonated a
Muslim doctor and dervish. Burton’s position on slavery and impe-
rialism was ambivalent: he employed slave traders during his travels,
abhorred mixed-race unions, and was scornful of abolitionism, yet from
the early 1860s until 1880 he repeatedly called on the British govern-
ment to abolish the slave trade in the Red Sea and in Egypt and to
abandon the West Africa settlements, referring to slavery as ‘a blasphemy
against humanity’.137 His contempt for Catholicism and his lifelong
religious disagreement with his wife Isobel, a devout Catholic intent on
converting him, are displaced into the race question and Knightley’s rage
at Sylvia’s abolitionist fervour. Burton’s interest in Eastern erotica and in
cataloguing the sexual particularities of different nations, and more spe-
cifically his fascination with circumcision, castration, and mutilation are
projected into Knightley’s pornographic tastes. Like Knightley, Burton
published erotica, some of which were printed under pseudonyms
and under the guise of a fictive publishing house. His unexpurgated

translation of and scholarly annotations to the Arabian Nights secured

him great acclaim. While his sense of exile (born to English parents, he
was brought up in France) is recreated in Knightley, Burton’s paternity
was never in question. As Starling’s and other recent novels intimate,
Burton has joined the company of ‘eminent Victorians’ (the Brontës,

Brownings, Dickens, Charles Dogdson, James, Tennyson, Wilde) re-
imagined in the genre of neo-Victorian ‘bio-fiction’.138
Two of Dora Damage’s central scenes are played out between Knightley,
Dora, and Diprose in Knightley’s study, which bears some resemblance to
Cuvier’s museum and laboratory in Hottentot Venus: bursting with stuffed
exotic animals, rare anatomy books, ethnographic and travel equipment
and books (with several volumes by Burton) and erotic world literature
(Boccaccio’s Decameron), it boasts a tiger skin and an Anatomical Venus at
opposite sides of the room, as if to indicate the correspondences between
a wild animal tamed in death and the body of woman made safe by the
scalpel. Anatomical Venuses were wax models of women’s bodies with
detachable fronts from which the organs could be removed. Used for
medical training purposes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
replicas of the male and female body addressed sanitary and psychologi-
cal issues resulting from the handling of corpses, as well as the shortage
of human bodies available.139 However, Anatomical Venuses differed
from male anatomical models in their meticulous adornment (long hair,
fingernails, painted lips, sometimes necklaces) and in their eroticized
poses; they often reposed on silk cushions (Figure 3.6).140 The glass cases
in which they are displayed today associate them with Sleeping Beauty,
the dormant object of desire forever compliant with the male gaze.
In order to gauge Dora’s response to the spectacle of sexualized science,
Knightley positions himself alongside her ‘as if he wanted to see what
I was seeing’ (102). What she sees is of course not what she gets: the
ambiguous title of the opulently bound volume of Andreas Vesalius’s
De humani corporis fabrica (1543, ‘On the fabric of the human body’), the
first anatomy book based primarily on human dissection, which revolu-
tionized medical science in the Renaissance, will figure prominently later
on in the novel, when Dora discovers this to be the title of the mysteri-
ous book she was made to inscribe blindfolded: ‘De humani corporis
fabrica’, made from human flesh. Here again, the gaze is instrumental
in structuring the sexual power relations between the objects of medical,
scientific, and pornographic discourses and the men producing and dis-
seminating these discourses. Before informing Dora that she meets the
requirements of the job, Knightley offers her an appraisal of herself which
involves an analysis of her physiognomy and case notes of her parental

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect -
2011-03-08
Figure 3.6 Venus Anatomica, Felice Fontana Workshop, Florence, 1780s, painted wax figure © The Semmelweis Museum, Library
and Archives of the History of Medicine, Budapest, Hungary
137
medical history. At the end of her visit Dora is presented with the Noble
Savages stamp with which she is instructed to mark the rear covers of
the books she will bind;141 she herself is of course later to be branded
similarly when her posterior is tattooed with the Noble Savages imprint
in Diprose’s preparation for her murder and prospective reprocessing:

‘I, who was once a woman, was to become a book covering . . . Sartor
Resartus. The binder re-bound’ (409).142
In contradistinction to Cuvier’s museum, which in Hottentot Venus is
the site of Sarah’s most humiliating exhibition during her lifetime, race
appears to feature only marginally in Knightley’s study: the ‘tribal spears,
beaded headdresses, and shields’ (102) on display on the walls are hardly
taken in by Dora. And yet they play a major part in the denouement of
the novel, the second key scene in Knightley’s study, when Dora, with
the help of her lover, the freed American slave Din, kills Diprose, in self-
defence, with a spear and an overdose of chloroform, the latter admin-
istered with the verbal assistance of Knightley. Race, and in particular
sexual stereotypes of race, matter greatly to the Knightley household:
visitors encounter the race question on the very doorstep in the form
of a hatstand in the shape of a semi-nude African boy. In the course of
her first meeting with her employer Dora learns of Knightley’s intense
distaste for his wife’s abolitionist convictions; later, when he casts her
out for giving birth to a dark-skinned baby, even Dora suspects Lady
Knightley of having exploited Din before he joined her business. What
only transpires at the end, in an intertextual echo of Kate Chopin’s
‘Désirée’s Baby’ (1893),143 is that Knightley harbours a ‘dark’ secret
hinted at already in his Noble Savages alias ‘Nocturnus’ (a pun on his
name: Knightley/nightly): that of his own mixed-race origins. His father
was a French diplomat at the Algerian court; in a period of chaos after
political relations broke down his English mother was raped (a scenario
reminiscent of The Lustful Turk, the – authentic – pornographic book
Dora is instructed to bind).144
Knightley’s fixation with human skin and bodily inscriptions, as well
as his simultaneous revulsion by and fascination with African sexuality
reveal deep-seated psychological issues. This is indicated by the ever
more repulsive racist materials Dora receives for binding, such as a
book featuring the Hottentot Venus entitled Afric-Anus (in its evocation
of Ashbee’s pseudonym, Pisanus, an intertextual pun on the puerile
nature of pornographic designations); its sub-title invokes the malaise
of white masculinity: A Scientific Foray into the Size of the Negro Rectum in
Relation to the Penis; followed by an Essay on the Libidinosity of Women of
Colour (213). Not only does Knightley own the human skin of a Hindu

Sex and Science 139
widow, he also fantasizes about ‘L[a] peau de ma femme’ (384),145 telling

his wife during their happier days that he is so enamoured of her skin
that ‘he wanted to bind a volume of the finest love poetry from [her]
shoulders after [her] death, so he would never have to be parted from
their smoothness’ (385). His obsession is indicative of his profound

anxiety about his own skin and its racial classifications (subaltern like
the Indian widow; or English, upper class, and of the master race like
his wife?). This may account for the startling contradictions in his life,
of on the one hand ‘build[ing] [his] very career on the subjugation of
[his] own race’ (435), and on the other inscribing his secret self on his
body. The body tattoo he had inflicted on himself in order to be taken
for an indigenous African during a dangerous expedition and his desire
to have his complete works bound ‘with the skin from [his] torso, with
the scar left by the spear resplendent across the back panel, and the
tattoo round [his] navel on the front’ (147) constitute racial markers
which he displays in spectacular fashion while concealing their hidden
meanings. Ultimately he is able to uncover himself only to Dora, and
disappears into the heart of his darkness, Africa, after leaving his estate
to his mixed-raced son.
The afterlife of the characters offers a personal-cum-political solution
to the sexual colonization of women. By starting to give bookbinding
lessons for women and founding a female bookbinding union (428)146
Dora helps to establish a viable career pathway that will enable women
to move beyond the bleak choice of whorehouse, workhouse, mad-
house. Starling’s dénouement is significantly dissimilar to the move
of Sarah Waters’s Maud Lilly into rather than out of the sex trade. In
Fingersmith (2003)147 Maud has internalized her pornographic training
by her uncle (another version of Henry Spencer Ashbee) to the point
of no return and concludes her narrative existence by writing lesbian
pornography for the male heterosexual market. In contrast, Starling
provides a programmatically feminist outlook for her protagonist. This
also applies to personal relationships, where two counter-families – a
non-sexual marriage between gay friends for the purposes of compan-
ionship and mutual protection and a female community of two women
and their children – set new agendas for lifestyles more commonly
found in the early twenty-first century than in 1902, the year Lucinda’s
Epilogue ends. The text outlines the possibility of but ultimately rejects
a romantic ending for Dora and Din, who part in order to achieve
their separate political missions: while the Victorian period witnessed
mixed-race marriages,148 this is not an option for Starling’s couple.
Dora’s feminist aspirations prove more successful: with the publication

of her journal she accomplishes what in The Observations Bessy plans to

undertake at the end of her journey, and what Sarah Baartman realizes
through her voiceover: to reclaim the female body for women’s writing,
and thus to overwrite and invalidate the male gaze and its objectifying
and dehumanizing discourses. Like a Victorian Hélène Cixous149 Dora

calls on women to write themselves into existence: ‘I wanted to hand
[notebooks] out on New Cut and Lambeth Walk, throw them from
Waterloo Bridge to the mud-larks, walk up the street and give them to
Mrs Eeles, Nora Negley . . . Write them, I would scream at them. What
are we to write, their faces would ask . . . Your dreams, I would cry. Your
thoughts. Your fantasies. Yours, and yours alone. In your own voice. Not
constructed for you by Mr Eeles . . . or Mr Negley, dead or alive. Author
your own body. Walk your own text’ (392).
3.5 Conclusion
The three novels examined in this chapter problematize the multiple

ways in which sexual, social, and racial hegemonies were created and
maintained by the scopophilic, disciplining, mutilating régime of sci-
ence, exploring the possibility of resistance and the potential of a female-
authored reinscription and resurrection of the female body. As the case of
Baartman illustrates, this was more difficult to achieve in real life than in
fiction. Chase-Riboud’s and Starling’s novels provide chilling reminders
of the factual sexual violence inflicted on the bodies of women in the
name of science. In her Afterword Starling notes that Hankey ‘owned
several volumes of pornography bound in human skin. Richard Burton
promised him that he would bring back a piece of human skin from his
trip to Dahomey in 1863 (stripped from “une négresse vivante” so that it
would retain its luster)’ (446–7).150 The sadistic tastes of Cannibal Club
members are also expressed in a commonplace book entry by Monckton
Milnes dated 1860 and partly quoted in Dora Damage (447): ‘There is no
accounting for tastes . . . Hankey would like to have a Bible bound with
bits of skin stripped off live from the cunts of a hundred little girls and
yet he could not be persuaded to try the sensation of f-ing a Muscovy
Duck while its head was cut off . . . Hankey’s line of cruel enjoyment
and his strong sense of the wickedness of killing animals for food. His
extreme desire to see a girl hanged and have the skin of her backside
tanned to bind his “Justine” with.’151 Such fantasies may well have been
restricted to the disturbed minds of individuals, but as Sigel points out,
the pornographic impulse embedded in the ethnographic studies and the
erotic reading and writing habits of the Cannibal Club arose from within

Sex and Science 141
the same scientific and social contexts from which the new disciplines of
anthropology, sexology, natural history and psychology developed: ‘Just
as the empire reached its apex and the human sciences gained legitimacy
at the beginning of the 1880s, the Cannibal Club apparently disbanded.
The emergent disciplines overtook the club’s ways of thinking about

sexuality and further legitimized them.’152 Starling’s and Chase-Riboud’s
novels raise disconcerting questions about the conceptual paradigms of
contemporary science.
The fantasy of partaking in scientifically legitimated necrophiliac
pleasures was recently brought to the global public by Gunther von
Hagens’s sensational ‘Körperwelten’ (‘Body Worlds: An Anatomical
Opus’, 1997–2009) exhibition, which by 2002 had attracted over eight
million visitors worldwide,153 and in which corpses donated to medical
science were presented, flayed like medieval torture victims, in pro-
vocative poses (one of the exhibits in the 2002 London exhibition, for
example, was shown playing at chess, a metaphor for the game of life
and death in which von Hagens aims to engage his audience). Visitors
to this combination of a Victorian freak and a contemporary peep show
crossed with the genres of slasher and snuff movie were welcomed by
the Gothic fantasy of a pair of ghost riders in the tradition of Gottfried
August Bürger’s 1773 poem ‘Lenore’ (‘The dead ride fast’).154 Edgar Allan
Poe’s similarly titled poem of 1845 about a beautiful woman claimed
by death155 further illustrates what has evidently become ‘the most
poetical topic in the world’:156 the corpse as an erotic spectacle and mass
market commodity.157 The erotics of the corpse, as Elisabeth Bronfen
has demonstrated,158 serves to reaffirm rather than dissolve tropes of
gender. Von Hagens’s representation of the paradigmatic male and
female body is, predictably, stereotypical and fetishistic: warrior mas-
culinity (an erect, muscular body in active fencing position)159 meets
sexually provocative femininity, inviting the scopophilic gaze even in
death (a female corpse reclining sideways, with one arm coquettishly
held against the back of the head).160 The erotic positioning of von
Hagens’s female cadaver bears striking resemblance to the iconography
of the Anatomical Venus. These prototypes carry powerful echoes of
male Western science across the centuries. The most revealing exhibit
was the one in which the 2002 show culminated: ‘the bisected cadaver
of an eight-months pregnant woman with her womb opened to reveal
the foetus’. As the Guardian reported, ‘Von Hagens always arranges the
exhibition this way: it starts relatively mutedly with preserved body
parts and ends with the emotional climacteric’ of what von Hagens calls
his ‘edutainment’.161

If, following Andreas Vesalius’s lead, male scientists like von Hagens
believe that ‘the violation of the body [is] the revelation of its truth’,162
it is surely no accident that much of contemporary women’s writing
is so intent on interrogating the ways in which the sexual body of
woman has been inscribed and objectified in cultural and textual his-

tory. Women’s historical and neo-Victorian fiction draws attention to
and thus challenges us to confront the continuing legacy in our own
time of the sexual violation of the human and especially the female
body cloaked in the guise of science and education. In exploring the
resistance of their fictional protagonists to actual abuses in the past,
neo-Victorian fiction by women seeks to overwrite the pornographic
‘edutainment’ of our contemporary present.

4
Spectrality and S(p)ecularity:
Some Reflections in the Glass

A scopic culture developed from the possibilities of
just three vitreous elements combined and recom-
bined, the glass panel, the mirror, and the lens. These
had been available for centuries but they now took
different forms . . . In the nineteenth century glass
became a third or middle term: it interposed an
almost invisible layer of matter between the seer and
the seen – the sheen of a window, the silver glaze of
the mirror, the convexity or concavity of the lens . . .
To look through glass in the mid-nineteenth century
was most likely to look through and by means of the
breath of an unknown artisan. The congealed residues
of somebody else’s breath remained in the window,
decanter, and wineglass, traces of the workman’s body
in the common bottle, annealed in the substance
he worked. Held up to the light a piece of common
nineteenth-century window glass will display small
blemishes, blisters, almost invisible striae, spectral
undulations that are the mark of bodily labour and a
brief expectation of life.
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds (2008)1
One of the surprising things about glass, to northern-

ers, must have been its resemblance to ice, and its
difference from ice. Glass is made from sand, heated
and melted: ice is a form of water, which shifts from
solid to liquid with the seasons. The fairy stories which
I now see provided much of my secret imagery as a
143

child are northern tales about ice, glass, mirrors. It is

surprising how often they go together.
A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories (2000)2
In previous chapters we have examined the influence of material,

mnemonic and literary inheritances, and scientific investigation in
relation to Victorian discourses of race and sexuality. Alongside science,
religion is at the heart of the Victorian period’s self-conceptualization.
In this chapter, therefore, we take the simultaneously technological
and scientific configuration of glass and specularity as a motif through
which to interrogate notions of belief, faith, and religious understand-
ing in neo-Victorian explorations of the nineteenth century’s doubts
about philosophical and transcendental interpretation and identity.
We are tracing the nature of glass and the mirror, pinpointed so accu-
rately by Byatt as at the roots of the northern European fairytale, as
metaphorical representations of the spectral and the s(p)ecular in our
reinterpretation of the Victorians’ use of such tropes.
Isobel Armstrong’s recent book Victorian Glassworlds (2008) is a reflec-
tion on the cultural possibilities of reading the Victorians’ fascination,
even obsession, with glass as part of a wider metaphorical and metaphysi-
cal investigation of transparency as a political, social, and philosophical
ideal. Armstrong’s evocation of the nineteenth century’s optical refraction
through the idea of the ‘Victorian glassworld’ poses important questions
about the nature of Victorian vision in multiple senses. The ‘middle term’
of Armstrong’s discussion, the intermediary state of the window, mirror, or
lens, is, we would suggest, adaptable to the ways in which neo-Victorian
literature sets up a mirror-like or reflective stance between our own period
and that of the nineteenth century. The ‘invisible layer of matter between
the seer and the seen’ could usefully be viewed as the textual layering of
the contemporary novel and its Victorian narrative, the text becoming
almost a glass permitting a double-viewed reflection. This double view
and the visual sense of ‘looking backwards’ to the Victorians through con-
temporary lenses has been evoked though not explored in detail in recent
critical works such as Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror
(2007) and Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007).3
But while such analyses have remarked on the disconnected continuities
and fragmentations of those reflections using a range of literary and
cultural moments from recent years, very little has been written on the
ways in which neo-Victorian spectrality can be seen as a reflection of our
inability to recapture the Victorians, and the impossibility of see(k)ing
the ‘truth’ of the period through either fiction or fact, a point made by

Spectrality and S(p)ecularity 145
Gary Day in reviewing both Joyce and Kaplan’s works in relation to religion
in particular.4 Texts themselves become shadows, spectres and written
ghosts that never quite materialize into substantive presences but instead
remain simulations of the ‘real’.
Much of the impossibility of providing the ‘proof’ for an ‘authentic’

experience of Victorianism comes down to a sense of the antithetical
nature of our religious or spiritual relationship with the Victorians.
Patricia Duncker has recently spoken of the neo-Victorian novel’s reti-
cence in engaging with the multiple crises of religious faith undergone
in the nineteenth century.5 Yet we would argue that both the failure to
voice these crises and the dangers of overlooking them when they do
occur in contemporary texts is to miss the ‘small blemishes’ in the glass
that Armstrong writes about in a powerful discussion of the human
presence of glass. Armstrong comments on this investment in the
human nature of glass not only in terms of its manufacture at a gen-
eral level but also through the way in which glass and its divinity, its
magic, captured the ‘ghostly’ or spectral presence of its creator’s breath.
Although Armstrong does not bring out the parallel explicitly, there is
a sense in which her description is related to the question of Victorian
spiritualism and the desire to see the mist of the mirror both as human
and spirit-like, divine and earthly. The mystical, even magical nature
of the glass object is always a deception, just as the mirror is never a
true reflection of reality. The textuality and materiality of the window,
mirror, or lens is thus a filter through which imagination and difference
might meet, as closely as possible, the true or authentic. In this respect,
it is worth considering how the visuality of the spectral and textual
is posited in contemporary fiction that has to deal with the different
nature of Victorian experience and its inconsistencies with contempo-
rary negotiations of the past. One way to address this is through the
return to the Victorians’ fascination with the possibilities of the spirit
world and mediumship. Again, we think Armstrong’s Victorian narra-
tive is a useful lens here, particularly when she configures the nature
of the duality of glass; as she writes, ‘Glass is an antithetical material. It
holds contrary states within itself as barrier and medium. The riddles it
proposes arise from the logic of its material and sensuous nature.’6 Such
‘riddles’, one might argue, are the core tensions of Victorian belief,
drawn into the division between the stained-glass window providing
a pathway to God on the one hand and the scientist’s microscope
exploring the evidence for human origins on the other; it was just such
a dialectic as this which was exploited in the nineteenth century by
writers and scientists alike.

This visuality is spectral and specular in the sense that it haunts by

its very presence in and dislocation from the real. Although the mirror
or glass sets up the difference between states (reality, mirage) and the
spiritualism of the Victorians provides a similar binary (living, dead),
these are nevertheless permeable barriers. ‘Transparency’, Armstrong com-

ments, ‘encourages a simple dualism, or, what is the opposite form of the
same thing, the collapse of seer and seen into one another.’7 Armstrong’s
suggestion here of the inherent ontological and epistemological tensions
of glass bears relation to Julian Wolfreys’s Derrida-influenced comments
on the nature of spectrality itself. Wolfreys writes: ‘[t]he identification
of spectrality appears in a gap between the limits of two ontological
categories . . . by emerging between, and yet not as part of, two nega-
tions: neither, nor. A third term, the spectral, speaks of the limits of
determination, while arriving beyond the terminal both in and of iden-
tification in either case (alive/dead)’.8 Spectrality and glass, clarity and
opacity, visibility and obscurity – all these terms are connected within
the thread of the ‘(alive/dead)’ parentheses of Wolfreys’s statement and
within those ‘blemishes’ of Armstrong’s Victorian glassworlds. The dan-
ger of espousing a (neo-)Victorian liberal humanism here is evident, but
on the other hand it appears in the following reading of neo-Victorian
texts that it is precisely these elements, fragments, spectres and dislo-
cated visions of potential faith beyond the ‘real world’ that are at stake.
Wolfreys’s text demonstrates in a different and yet similar vein the
haunting presence of the Victorian spectre at a textual level, ranging
from Charles Dickens through to Virginia Woolf. As Wolfreys states in
the series of questions at the beginning of his book, ‘What does it mean
to speak of spectrality and of textual haunting? What does it mean to
address the text as haunted? How do the ideas of haunting and spec-
trality change our understanding of particular texts and the notion of
the text in general?’9 We would add: what does it mean to write about
Victorian spiritualism and/or faith in a neo-Victorian (con)text? What is
it we want to see and in what do we desire to (dis)believe?
This is part of a wider reflection on the ideas of spectrality, specularity,
ghosts, the dead and the living. The historical pull of the past, the con-
figuration of the present through the timeworn lens and the melancholic
nostalgia which is always a foreboding of our own mortality are each
(dis)embodied in our awareness of a sensory reality that is fragile, transient
and yet endures beyond ourselves. One might think here of Slavoj Žižek’s
Lacanian ‘philosophy of the real as absent, non-existent’10 and the impact
this has on our re-reading and re-visioning of the past through fiction, itself
in some ways a non-real construct. The past is forever a reflection that our

individual human future is not limitless, and in that sense ensures that
our return to history and our belief in something beyond the here and
now are indivisibly linked within the imagination. For the Victorians,
such earthly limitations were accepted and acceptable while the persist-
ence of the soul in an immortal condition held sway; after the religious

crises of the mid-nineteenth century, such certainties were replaced or
perhaps shadowed by faith in a spiritual world of ghosts, séances and
a different plane of existence. As Ronald Pearsall puts it, ‘Spiritualism
and the resurgence of the occult found fertile soil in Victorian England
[because it] . . . provided a respectable fulfilment of this desire.’11 More
recently, and in specific relation to the contexts and continuities between
late-Victorian and neo-Victorian understandings of the séance, Tatiana
Kontou has asked:
to what extent do these author-mediums ventriloquize the dead? If

the dead speak through the medium, then surely we can argue that
the medium also speaks through them? How do we distinguish
between these new and old voices? How are we to interpret this spec-
tral dialogue between two worlds? What is added and what is taken
away? What is lost forever in transmission?12
This chapter addresses such questions not, as in Kontou’s work, through

a specifically gendered reading of the nature of the Victorian or neo-
Victorian séance, but rather by an interpretation which privileges the
use of a specific metaphorical objectification – that of glass. The multi-
plicity of the glass figure, as outlined by Armstrong, permits a refracted
and reflective negotiation of issues of belief and faith to be provided,
not through the figure of the ghost or the performativity of the séance,
but instead via the divergent nature of those ‘glassworlds’ for different
(re)interepretations in and of the period.
In recent neo-Victorian fiction the figure of the Victorian ghost,
or the sense of the ghostliness of the Victorian past, has increasingly
come to the fore. As a motif, the idea of the nineteenth-century spec-
tre serves as a useful corollary to the contemporary author’s aware-
ness of the ‘haunting’ presence of the Victorian period even into the
twenty-first century. However, while critical work has explored this
haunting and ghosting in terms of the refracted moment of historical
fiction more generally, we want to assert the more connective threads
surrounding shadows and ghosts of the Victorian period in the present
as a re-articulation of the Victorians’ own fascination with séances,
spectres, and other spookish things.13 While other chapters in this

book touch on the nature of ghostly inheritances and mourning

(Chapter 1) and magic and trickery (Chapter 5), rather than provid-
ing an interpretation of the neo-Victorian spirit (in simultaneously
ghostly, temperamental, and psychical senses) through contemporary
novels’ reworking of Victorian motifs, this chapter instead seeks to

facilitate a reflection on our sense of belatedness and the need to write
out or exorcize our Victorian spirits in the contemporary sphere. Our
argument is that, even as we are obsessed by knowing, summoning
up, and possessing/being possessed by the Victorians, we are enact-
ing a specifically nineteenth-century preoccupation with the spectral,
s(p)ecular, and reflective possibilities of the historical mirror, whether
intact or, like the Lady of Shalott’s, ‘crack’d’. While neo-Victorian
novels may frequently debunk the Victorian belief in spirits and
séances, their own narratives speak to the notions of spiritualism,
mediumship, and the desire for a version of the Victorian afterlife;
in this sense, the chapter also probes the issue of secularity then and
now, and the problem of how contemporary fiction set in the nine-
teenth century can believably address the Victorian crisis of faith in
the light of our own post-Christian contexts.
‘To speak of the spectral, the ghostly, of haunting in general’,
Wolfreys notes, ‘is to come face to face with that which plays on the
very question of interpretation and identification, which appears, as it
were, at the very limit to which interpretation can go.’14 In this context
it is useful to think about how many neo-Victorian novels rely upon
this sense of ‘interpretation and identification’. Much neo-Victorianism
winks knowingly at the reader who can recognize the allusion to other
texts, and plays on the margins with a self-reflective and metafictional
stance. Details such as the meta-authentic nature of the introductions
and footnotes provided by fictional editors, which we discussed in the
Introduction, signal that just as the spectre is summoned through the
text’s mimicry, so too is the suspicion of the investigation involved
in the reading of the narrative; in Chapter 1 we discuss such themes in
relation to mourning but here we want to deal with them in terms of
encoding. In her discussion and interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s work,
Jodey Castricano uses the term ‘cryptomimesis’. Castricano defines this
as the process within texts which ‘draws attention to a writing predi-
cated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged
within parts of individual works.’15 It is our contention in this chapter
that much of the spectral nature of the play between ghostliness and
writing in the novels we are discussing comes from this cryptomimetic
method; that it constitutes a form of ghostwriting at multiple levels,

often connected with a quasi-religious rather than encrypted sense of

‘revelation and concealment’.
Sarah Waters’s novel Affinity (1999) provides a brief way into this
theme. Set in and around Millbank prison in London in the 1870s it
involves a dual narrative divided between the diary entries of two female

protagonists. The novel is discussed in some detail in the next chapter,
and so here we want only to draw attention to Waters’s scopic meta-
phor at two important moments. The first occurs when Margaret Prior
has just taken up her duties as a lady visitor at Millbank, and involves
one of the female wardens telling her about the therapeutic nature of
observing the prisoners. Margaret writes in her diary that ‘[s]he said she
had never had a visitor yet that didn’t like to stand at that window and
watch the women walk. It was as curative, she thought, as gazing at fish
in a tank. After that, I moved from the glass.’16 What is important at this
moment is that we are watching Margaret through her own narrative as
she is repulsed by the idea of watching and being watched. The move
away from the glass cannot be enacted against the reader’s observation
of Margaret and, in the act of recording it in her diary, Margaret draws
attention to her inability really to understand the nature of scopic
power. This is fundamental to our perception of the nature of the trick
that Waters plays on her readers later in the text, for the clue, the cryp-
tomimetic line, is there for us to follow from the earliest point of the
narrative. What we are faced with, however, is a desire to believe, to
place our faith in the act of storytelling itself and our unbounded trust
in the spectral narrator of the text.
While observation and looking is the key to Affinity, we don’t really
‘see’ what is presented to us because we displace our belief onto another
part of the narrative. Indeed, in terms of spectrality we are blind to the
Marxist implications of the term. For what we see(k) in this version of
neo-Victorian fiction is satisfaction for our interest in the Victorians
and their hidden sexuality. We ignore the original ‘spectres of Marx’
declared in The Communist Manifesto (‘A spectre is haunting Europe’)17
when we fail to realize that the servant in the household carries the
key to the narrative. This exploitation of our cultural weak spots (sug-
gestively inherited from the Victorians, like so much else) serves to
play in a sophisticated way with the spectral presences we will permit
ourselves to see and those we will not. We are prepared, potentially, to
suspend our disbelief and believe that Selina Dawes is able to contact
the spirit world and transplant herself to Margaret’s bedroom rather
than acknowledge the presence of the servant woman Ruth Vigers.
In the scene where Margaret realizes that the locket she places on the

dressing-table mirror every night has gone, we want to share her belief
in the spectral otherness of the misted mirror: ‘It [the water] was not
quite chill, but it had misted the looking-glass; and as I wiped that
I looked, for I always looked, for my locket. – My locket was gone! and I
cannot say where’ (90). The desire to place faith in what that ‘misted . . .

looking-glass’ might represent places both Margaret and the reader at a
disadvantage. It serves to deflect our attention away from the figure in
the background, the ‘presence’ inside the mirror and behind Margaret
as she looks into the glass. The lack of clarity in Margaret’s gaze into the
mirror reveals our own selectiveness when examining what lies in that
‘rearview mirror’ in cultural and social terms too.
Following on from this opening discussion of the semiotics of glass
and ghosting, this chapter will turn our gaze to some reflections on
the neo-Victorian spectral text as exemplified by Charles Palliser’s The
Unburied (1999) and Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows (2002); A.S. Byatt’s
The Children’s Book (2009); Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter
(2008); and John Harwood’s novel The Séance (2008).
4.1 ‘[L]ights and shadows moving on the inside of the

windows’: Charles Palliser’s The Unburied (1999) and
Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows (2002)18
At both the margins and the core of Waters’s novel is the figure of
Margaret’s father, the professional historian George Prior. Invoked as
muse to his daughter’s journal (‘I wish that Pa was with me now’),19
Prior also features – as the surname indicates – as a haunting presence
in the narrative at key moments, and may even be the character whose
breath she also desires to have clouded that mirror (she is dreaming of
him just before this moment). The second novel we want to look at
also features professional historians, not in the sphere of the prison but
in the equally cloistered and entrapping narrative of ghosts, faith, and
spectrality in the cathedral close. Charles Palliser’s historical quasi-crime
novel20 The Unburied is, like the ‘so-called restoration work’ (19) being
undertaken on the cathedral building at its heart, a text which attempts
to reconstruct the possibilities of Victorian narrative technique through
an able pastiche of the late-Victorian and Edwardian ghost story. The
novel is centred round the Cambridge scholar Dr Courtine’s Christmas
visit to Thurchester to stay with an old friend from whom he has been
estranged for two decades. The purpose of Courtine’s visit is to trace a
manuscript in Thurchester’s cathedral archives, the existence of which
is doubted by many of his fellow scholars. His burning desire to unearth

the document is driven not so much by scholarly passion as primarily

by personal rivalry with another academic – a rivalry which reflects on
the murderous consequences in a story from the town’s history during
the English Revolution. Academics, college politics, the world of the
cloister, political history, superstition and folklore, facts and authen-

tication of the evidence: all these elements are blurred in Palliser’s
narrative, which is haunted by the ghost stories of M.R. James and the
unreliable narrative strategies of Henry James in The Turn of the Screw
(1898). The narratives of both Jameses are of course ‘spectral texts’ in
their own right: each looks back to an earlier period and dislocates a
sense of textual time and historicity from the present moment of the act
of story-telling. In the case of Henry James this is via reminiscence; in
the work of M.R. James it is to be found in the fact that his Edwardian
stories are themselves under the spell of the Victorians, returning as
they do to a late-Victorian past. But they are also concerned with ques-
tions of belief, faith, and a focus on the simultaneous desire to know
and not know the nature of a spectral ‘truth’.
Like many neo-Victorian novels, Palliser’s text provides a metafictional
commentary on the nature of historical fiction writing and the reasons
behind our readerly (and writerly) desires to invoke the spectral text. As
the Dean of Thurchester’s wife, Mrs Locard, asks Courtine: ‘Don’t you
think that we read our own desires into the figures from the past about
whom we reflect because, as erring mortals, we cannot be dispassionate?’
(135). ‘Passion’ in the sense of intellectual craving, physical desire, and
Christian theology is a loaded term in this text, which contains many
disquisitions on the nature of faith and religious belief. Earlier in the
novel, Courtine engages in a debate with his former friend Austin about
precisely such matters. Austin, once a ‘Tractarian of a very dandyish
kind’ (36), is placed into contrast with Courtine and his ‘conviction that
religion was a conspiracy of the powerful against the rest’ (36). What
most dispirits Courtine is Austin’s articulation of religion as the placing
of unconditional faith in the ‘truth’ of narratives, the near-sanctification
of story and interpretation. As Austin declares, ‘without faith, all you
have is superstition. Fear of the dark, of ghosts, of the realm of death
which continues to frighten us, whatever we believe. We need stories
to stop us being frightened. You’ve created your comforting myths and
fictions from history . . . You are creating your own stories to console you’
(37). While Courtine admits that he respects the morality of Christianity,
it is historical truth, the verifiable fact and documentary evidence that
holds a higher power over his view of the world. In many ways what the
text explores is Courtine’s inability and even reluctance to look more

closely into the glass and imagine something beyond the temporal; it
is a narrative as much concerned with secularity as with specularity.
Austin, on the other hand, all too willingly promotes confidence in the
act of faith:

What I’m talking about is faith, belief, acceptance of the abso-
lute reality of salvation and damnation. You – and others of our
generation – lost your faith because you decided that science can
explain everything. I believed that myself for a while but I came
to understand that reason and faith are not in conflict. They are
different orders of reality. Although I understand that now, when
I was younger I shared your error. I know now that because there
is darkness, there is light. That because there is death, there is life.
Because there is evil, there is goodness. Because there is damnation,
there is redemption. (37)
The restoration metaphor is at work here but in a religious sense, and

through the dialectic of the mirror or shadow. The view of the contraries
that prove the existence of the othered and yet corollary counter state
demonstrates that sense of faith in a balanced, ordered, rational and
structured universe. One can believe, this argument contends, even if
one cannot know; one might think of Armstrong here and the descrip-
tion of the ‘antithetical material’ nature of glass in the period, holding
two contrary states in a unified object. Austin’s thinking is glass-like
in this respect, and posits a kind of spectral logic that Courtine finds
uncomfortable. The tension here between rationality and faith con-
tinues throughout Palliser’s novel and extends more broadly into the
neo-Victorian genre as a whole. The popularity of, and fear located
within, ghost stories, as the Victorians and Edwardians well knew,
work in the spaces of this dialectic: the rational will to understand and
debunk the inexplicable stands in a fraught relation with the instinctual
desire to believe in something beyond that which can be explained by
human consciousness, logic or science. This unease is of course some-
thing which is also reflected in our own contemporary relationship to
the spiritual and the secular, and it raises the important question of
how we address those issues of faith and belief that so fundamentally
informed the Victorian approach to the world.
One of the most significant moments of Palliser’s novel in rela-
tion to this point occurs when the narrator undergoes a momentary
vision which throws into question his dogmatic non-belief in the
world of the spirit. Dreamlike but also nightmarish, Courtine’s vision

is itself centred around the idea of observation and the specularity

of glass:
When I glanced up at the organ-loft I suddenly became aware of

where I was and had no idea how much time had passed or how

I had got to where I found myself. Over the edge of the rail was a
pale spot in the darkness and as I watched, it resolved itself into
a face which seemed to be gazing straight at me. A cold, white,
empty face with eyes that were two pieces of glass – empty and yet
they seemed to peer into me. They looked through my soul – or
rather my lack of a soul for they found or created an answering emp-
tiness within me. It was the face of a creature not of our world. How
long we stared at each other – or rather I stared at him for I cannot
be sure that he was looking at me – I have no means of knowing.
The face disappeared and I seemed to awake with a shudder and in
a cold sweat, and it was at that moment that I reconstructed the
sequence of events. I had an idea about who it was that I had seen,
but I could not accept it. Everything I knew and believed would be
thrown into confusion . . .
I had seen William Burgoyne. I was sure of it. In that case, the world
was not as I had imagined it. The dead could walk again, for a man
who had died two hundred years ago had appeared before me. That
meant that all that I believed – all the decent, rational, progressive
ideas by which I lived – were childish games that could only be played
in the daylight. (151–2, 153)
The protagonist’s desire to question, the scholarly pursuit of truth, and

yet the anxiety about the nature of material reality have always been
representative of the mid-Victorian angst of the characters presented
in the narrative. As Catherine Belsey comments, using Freud’s theo-
ries of the uncanny and supernatural, such ‘supernatural events . . .
are not in themselves uncanny: magic, apparitions, spectres and secret
powers do not disturb us when they appear in fairy tales . . . But their
occurrence in what seems like realism, when the Gothic invades the
mimetic, produces a degree of unease.’21 The unease is shared here by
both character and reader at the same level as such supernatural inter-
ventions ‘work’ in the ghost stories of M.R. James, Sheridan LeFanu,
Conan Doyle and numerous other Victorian writers of suspense. By
interposing the spectral into the secular imagination of Courtine
at this moment in the novel, Palliser reconfigures the doubt of the
Victorians into not so much a questioning of the one true church

as into a challenge to rationalism and secularity itself as modes of

existence. For if seeing is believing, then the hallucinatory status or
otherwise of Courtine’s vision changes the status of the narrative per-
spective on the tale.
However, there is the possibility in this passage that Palliser’s trickery is

to dupe the unsuspecting reader at this point into questioning the narra-
tor’s reliability, perhaps even his sanity. For him to visualize such a thing
as a ghost from several centuries before is in many ways a clichéd element
of the narrative. The conviction of being unable to determine what is
seen but to then leap to the most (ir)rational conclusion is symptomatic
of the claustrophobic tales of M.R. James, with his scholars driven to
distraction by their inability to read logically the evidence before them.
What we would like to suggest, however, is that this moment of vision is
ambiguous and plays with the identity of the author as much as the nar-
rator or a character within the text in a kind of imitation of John Fowles’s
self-portrayal in sections of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). In an
interview with Susana Onega published in 1993 after the appearance of
his epic neo-Victorian novel of inheritance and intricate patterning, The
Quincunx (1989), Palliser commented that ‘although [Fowles’s novel] is
a very clever, witty book, . . . there is too much of Fowles coming and
explaining and there are times when you really want him to leave the
reader alone with the characters’.22 Despite this criticism of Fowles’s
interventionist technique, Palliser’s The Unburied’s knowingness, such
as when one character says to another that ‘we don’t exist in and for
ourselves but only in as much as we are re-created in the imagination
of another person’ (62), indicates a certain playfulness about the idea of
this spectral presence in Courtine’s dreamlike vision; these characters,
for all their doubt, perceive the nature of an omniscient intelligence. The
spectre is the figure of the neo-Victorian novelist, acting as the medium
conjuring forth the spirits of undead literature through pastiche, and also
spectrally haunting those characters; the author is not entirely dead, but
he is a representative of the living dead (in multiple senses) within the
text itself. In Palliser’s complex and yet disarmingly simple interpretation
of the problems of realist fiction itself, the tensions of the (neo-)Victorian
novelist as observer, creator and narrator of characters become conflated
into a sense of the overarching divine consciousness of faith. No clari-
fication is provided for the reader, and part of the reason may be found
in another statement by Palliser, in the same interview, that fiction is
‘not expository, it’s actually experiential. You are not told things. You are
actually made to feel them.’23 This ‘experiential’ moment in the reading
of the neo-Victorian text is evidently present in Courtine’s description

of the ‘creature’ he ‘sees’. His agitation is reflected back to the reader but
is also conjured up through that reader’s awareness of a large range of
previous ghost stories. It thus becomes not only a reflection but also a
positive refraction through the lens, as contemporary readers speculate
on the contemporary writer’s attempt to capture the spectrality of the

Victorian ghost tale. In the absence of the Victorians’ omniscient God –
who was of course replaced in many ways by the omniscient narrator of
classic high realism – we might have instead the spectral presence of the
neo-Victorian writer, ghosting an identity in both present and past.
There is also a continual play being enacted and multiplied here in
the idea of the spectral and reflection as imagination and thought as
well as image and presence. Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows, another story
about the idea of church restoration and returning to the past at com-
munal and individual levels, provides a useful example in a scene where
two characters argue over the ‘reality’ of the past even down to its very
fabric. Having discovered a coffin while undertaking excavation and
modernization work in a remote English village, the church minister
Banks declares: ‘I want you to experience the active presence of the past,
to know this object [a brass coffin-plate] as it really is, charged with the
energies of other lives.’24 There is an inevitable irony here – made clear
very soon after as we read ‘when you disturb the dead, you disturb the
living too’ (60) – in the idea that a coffin-plate creates a connection with
the living. Yet Poster’s character is correct to see the coffin-plate and its
inscription as a textual haunting and a moment of spectrality which can
act as a pertinent and physical memento mori. For, like the mirror, it serves
as a reflection on our own mortality. But perhaps more dangerously such
reflections also give a sense of comfort which is the equivalent of story:
as Banks says, ‘Like any community – like any individual for that matter –
this village constructs and reconstructs its history partly on the basis
of interpretations which are, strictly speaking, erroneous. Fictions, if you
like, but fictions to which we must nevertheless give some form of
assent’ (63). The (un)conscious desire to believe in the pattern is itself
a form of faith, requiring as it does a belief in something which creates
order, lineage, inheritance, structure for a purpose. That both these state-
ments come from the novel’s central religious character is an important
reminder of the significance of the interpretative aspect of society such
figures provided for the Victorians, and also underlines one of the ways
in which we perhaps find it harder to access that aspect of their cul-
ture in neo-Victorian fiction. It is noticeable, however, that the parallel
is between misinterpretation of history and history being like ‘fiction’
because it underlines the similarity of the discourses. Religion too, after

all, works at the level of parable, and is also dependent for interpretation
upon our ‘assent’ via faith.
Both Palliser’s and Poster’s novels are concerned with the different
senses of restoration. In Palliser’s novel it is the restoration of a sense of
the contemporary: Courtine’s obsession with the manuscript evidence

of the past is an attempt to appease the accuracy of the historical record
and yet also to ensure his own reputation. For Poster’s characters, espe-
cially the narrator Stannard (the architect overseeing the restoration
work to the village church), it is the failure to recognize the difference
between narrative and reality, history and present, which determines
the action. But it is a storytelling based on choice and freedom which
has irrevocable consequences. As Stannard comes to conclude, every-
thing is based on: ‘Stories . . . all stories; and if I ask myself why that
story rather than another, I find I have no ready answer’ (276).
4.2 ‘When Alice stepped through liquid glass’:

A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009)25
In Palliser’s The Unburied a child plays a key role in uncovering the core
of the mystery, and in Poster’s novel the privileging of one story and
perspective over the others is the key decision for the narrator and, by
implication, reader. Children and the idea of children’s stories have
become more prominent in recent neo-Victorian fiction,26 and it is to
a novel concerned with both children and the telling of their stories
that we now turn. Byatt’s The Children’s Book covers the period from
the mid-1890s to the First World War, and thus engages with both the
neo-Victorian and the neo-Edwardian. Following the lives of a series of
children and their parents, the text opens up a reading of the intellec-
tual interactions, cultural exploration and experimentation, and period-
dividing attitudes of the late-Victorian and Edwardian ages through the
slippages, exchanges and enclosures of the individual families whose
relationships are described. As a novel which consciously blurs fact and
fiction, real figures and imagined identities, events which are verifiable
and those that are dreamed, The Children’s Book regularly reminds readers
of its own artificiality, indeed artifice, alongside the more collective
memory of an historical time period obsessed with its own presentism,
historical parentage, and future. As readers would expect from Byatt,
the text is full of playful games about its own ontological identity as
a fiction, the nature of narrative coincidence and convenience, and
the knowingness of the narrative voice. Byatt seems to lead us towards
an understanding of relationships around the domestic, the heart of

course of many a Victorian realist novel, a domestic fractured, however,

by the period’s sense of decadence and regression. It is a novel which
focuses with often pin-point accuracy on the late-Victorian period as
an age when the intelligentsia, and the progenitors of new social move-
ments and discourses, were constituting themselves in the positions of

adult and child, and occupied both sides of the Alice in Wonderland
looking-glass.
In The Children’s Book the crisis is one of time: the narrative feels nos-
talgic for its own moment, it moves forward and backwards continually
not in terms of structure but in the slippages between understandings of
the world around the characters, seeking reflections and patterns wher-
ever they may be found. The return to childishness and childhood by
both adults and adolescents alike is not sustainable in this period caught
between the two ‘grown up’ ages of the Victorian and the First World
War. It is the child-like unawareness of things outside of desire and
attraction and thought and body which leaves this society unprepared
for the realities and consequences of the magnitude of the horrors of
war and also the twentieth century more generally. As Byatt has one of
her characters comment early in the narrative when he sees the museum
vault, its ‘funereal chamber’, filled with moulded effigies, they are like
‘prisoners in the Underworld’ (6). The fact that this comment, made by
one of the children of the novel, coincides with the building works of
the South Kensington Museum (subsequently renamed the Victoria and
Albert Museum)27 is important. While Byatt’s novel is concerned with
childhood and story, adulthood and reality, it wraps these themes within
a kind of display case of the museum, creating a tale about the creation
of aesthetic artefacts and their exposition. Indeed, the construction of
museums, the display of objects and the development of a collective
and individual sense of identity through them is key to the text, and the
metaphor and materiality of glass play a significant role, reflected as it is
in its own beginnings and origins in the South Kensington Museum and
its incorporation of the world’s fair in Paris in 1900, and also in the fact
that one of the central characters is in charge of the museum, another
a fairytale writer, a third a potter. That the potter’s eventual apprentice,
Philip Warren, is discovered like a lost orphan ‘squatting beside one of
a series of imposing glass cases’ (3) in the museum at the novel’s start
reflects on how the narrative privileges a sense of the glass-like as spe-
cial, magical, fairytale-esque, and yet on the other hand ensures that it
acts as a point of distancing between characters, as a division of fiction
and reality, and as a substance through which we receive the narrative
within the text.

The building of the South Kensington Museum is a potent metaphor

for the construction of stories and their accessibility to readers, revealing
the creation of a space which exhibits artefacts that can tell something
about the past while simultaneously being removed from the speci-
fics of their original location, thus reflecting on the relation between

contemporary writers and the historical narratives they create. What is
significant here is how Byatt uses the theories of display and the exhibit
in her novel. As Judith Roof notes in a comparative essay on Victorian
museum practices of display and contemporary computer software
packages:
[i]n many exhibits, the presence of glass, used as a basic protective

element . . . rarefies, amplifies, and arrests these artifacts in time.
Victorian museum display separated artifacts twice: once from their
context and once from the consumer, producing in the museum or
exhibit a contiguous or metonymic relation between the display and
the artifacts, among artifacts, and between artifact and viewer . . .
[G]lass itself . . . became an element that both invited and restricted
the viewer.28
Roof’s comments remind us of the associated dependency of objects on

texts for meaning and accessibility when dislocated from their foun-
dational context. In her ‘Acknowledgements’ to The Children’s Book,
Byatt makes a related point about such objects and their presentation
behind the glass when she writes of her own experience in researching
the novel and handling items similar to those a character in the fiction
creates: ‘A pot in the hands is quite different from a pot behind glass’
(616). It is this sense of the exhibition and the display which allows
access to and yet distances from what is invoked when Byatt textu-
ally explores the Grande Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. The
text serves to heighten the reader’s awareness of the fragility of the
glassworks and other creative works Byatt imagines within it. Writing
of the Paris exhibition she has her characters think of the ‘palace of
mirrors’ and the ‘glass-roofed Grand Palais’ as carrying ‘the idiosyncratic
metaphysical charm of all meticulous human reconstructions of reality’
(245). This is one of the ways in which she structures her narrative:
those moments in the text where historical events are presented in
brief, as outside of or incidental to the world of the characters are like
the explanatory notes in the museum display case. Within the context
of historical fiction writing, and specifically the neo-Victorian, Byatt
might be seen to provide a comment about the relationship between

such fictions and the nature of museum displays. As Charles Saumarez

Smith notes in relation to contemporary museology, ‘[o]ne of the most
insistent problems that museums face’ is ‘the idea that artefacts can
be, and should be, divorced from their original context of ownership
and use, and redisplayed in a different context of meaning, which is

regarded as having a superior authority.’29 For the neo-Victorian nov-
elist this is a problem of representation: how does the neo-Victorian
novel work for the contemporary readership and provide a sense of
historical period without divorcing either from a notion of ‘context’?
Such historical notations as Byatt provides keep us updated with the
accuracies and actualities of events but are presented to us through the
lens of hindsight, with a regular sense that the characters themselves
(and those living through the period in reality) are unaware of what
these things mean. In a book so replete with those who write narratives,
adapt them, reinvent them, and read them, it is noticeable how few of
the characters can actually interpret the symbolism around them. For
example, the children’s writer in the novel, Olive Wellwood, we learn,
keeps her children’s narratives (which are both stories to be published
for unknown children and adults, and also stories composed specifically
for her children) in a ‘glass-faced cabinet’ (80), drawing a parallel to
the glass-case nature of the museum pieces; indeed, in an important
moment of the text which, for her children, breaks the spell of the magic
stories she creates, she is even photographed for a magazine article
alongside the bookcase. The disruptive presence of the modernity and
reality brought by the photograph means that the books and the chil-
dren within them come to stand as signifiers of the museum exhibit,
their childhoods locked into time through the relation of photography
to the public exhibition space (301–2). Yet Olive seems oblivious to the
glasslike fragility of her relationships with the children in her home.
In discussing the nature of her children’s writing with Prosper Cain,
‘Special Keeper of Precious Metals’ at the museum (3), Olive even tells
him that stories are like mirrors: ‘You know, Major, a story, especially a
mystery story, is all topsy-turvy. It works backwards, like tunnels of mir-
rors. The end is the cause of the beginning, so to speak’ (152). But the
comment is most unrevealing in the sense that later in the narrative it
is Olive’s failure to perceive the consequences of her actions in relation
to the one story that destroys one of the children.
In itself this serves as a comment on the nature of Byatt’s narrative,
which carries part of its meaning in the fact that we foresee, and thus
read ‘backwards’ the looming nature of 1914 and other aspects of the
characters’ future in a way that they themselves cannot. But the narrator

also suggests that for the characters it is the double look in the glass of
time, a look that moves in both directions, which provides the momen-
tum behind the action: ‘Backwards and forwards, both. The Edwardians
knew they came after something . . . They looked back. They stared and
glared backwards, in an intense, sometimes powerful nostalgia for an

imagined Golden Age’ (391). The mirror or glass metaphor continues
and provides a sense of metaphoric continuity throughout the text: one
of the ‘lost’ children of the narrative finds her real father, the fairytale
puppet-master, in the Spiegelgarten (‘a garden of mirrors’ [362]), and later,
within the horrors of the war trenches, another, Julian Cain, will gain the
material for his book of poems, Roll Call and Other Poems, with his lyric
‘The Woods’ beginning with the line ‘When Alice stepped through liquid
glass’ (594). It is reflected even in the false world of ‘Trench Names’,
in which Byatt’s character makes reference to the ‘English men’ who
‘[i]mposed a ghostly English map on French’ by naming the trenches
after London streets, the titles of novels, or the characters from them:
So here run Piccadilly, Regent Street

Oxford Street, Bond Street, Tothill Fields, Tower Bridge
And Kentish places, Dover, Tunbridge Wells
Entering wider hauntings, resonant,
The Boggart Hole, Bleak House, Deep Down and Gloom.
Remembering boyhood, soldier poets recall
The desperate deeds of Lost Boys, Peter Pan,
Hook Copse, and Wendy Cottage, Horrors lurk
In Jekyll Copse and Hyde Copse. Nonsense smiles
As shells and flares disorder tidy lines. (595)
The ‘wider hauntings’ of those ‘Nonsense smiles’ here provide the

indictment of a mirrored landscape without substance; a fakery or
trickery of false consolation provided by familiarity, especially in rela-
tion to literary mimicry. Given these comments on the construction of
glass chimaeras of reality, it is little surprise that a character like Tom,
the central child of the novel and the most significant child in Olive
Wellwood’s stories, thinks himself into a mirror-world of the (un)real:
‘He had sensed that the Garden of England was a garden through a
looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused
to return. He didn’t want to be a grown-up’ (364). Later, Byatt’s narra-
tive voice notes that the entire period’s distinctive characteristic is to be
found in its ‘backwards stare [with its] intense interest in, and nostalgia
for, childhood’ (394). Piecing together the symbolism of the novel’s

use of glass encourages the reader to recognize it as a reworking of the

‘pier-glass’ idea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72):
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even

your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has

shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface
of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely
and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against
it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches
will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles
round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going
everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces
the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling
with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The
scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of the person now
absent . . . 30
Byatt has described Eliot’s description as ‘one of the most striking

mirror-images in literature’.31 For Byatt, the nature of the glass within
her novel (especially when expanded to include the fragile symbolic
of the art works and collectibles frequently reflected upon throughout
the text) is like Eliot’s ‘pier-glass, or extensive surface of polished steel’,
which is itself not dissimilar to the cryptomimetic methodology we
discussed earlier. It is the patternings which give the ‘scratches’ of the
text meaning and substance, even as they demonstrate the ‘illusion’
behind this idea. We must decode the narrative in a way that the
characters never can, for we are presented as somehow superior readers
because we have the advantage of historicist hindsight. However, in
the implicit allusion to Eliot Byatt also seems to speculate on the
nature of the pattern-forming we desire as readers. Further, it is her
grounding of such arrangements as part of the ‘metaphysical charm of
all meticulous human reconstructions of reality’ (245) which provides
the contexts for faith and belief within the novel.
But there is a trickery involved here too. Like the glaze of Benedict
Fludd the potter’s creations, glass and the ornate reflectivity of the mir-
rored aesthetic world Byatt describes in this period serve to provide the
illusion of spectatorship and involvement at one and the same time.
In its textuality the novel is like the pot to which Byatt refers in her
‘Acknowledgements’: we handle this narrative, we engage with it, expe-
rience it, but only from the perspective of the museum display case.
There would be a difficulty in stepping into the ‘liquid glass’ of the text

precisely because its artifice and its expression and acceptance of the idea
of illusion constantly return back to us an image which questions what
we want the novel to do. Unlike Byatt’s more prominent engagement
with the neo-Victorian in Possession there is no attempt to bring readers
into a ‘romance’ plot or to provide a satisfactory resolution. The sugges-

tion here might be that the historical timeframe (1895–1919) is itself a
preventative of such an approach: how can the reader suspend a disbelief
in the constant and repeated knowledge within the text that the war is
coming, and that this is not about the survival of the Victorian but the
end of the Victorian. That comment about the Edwardians who ‘knew
they came after something’ recognizes the chronological inability to do
more than represent, in a poorer form, the images of the past. This is not
about mourning so much as despair concerning the absence of an ability
to reflect anything other than the spectral back to oneself.
This is why Byatt’s use of nostalgia as a means of commenting on this
period through the figure of the child and children is more problem-
atic than it at first appears. Nostalgia for the past of childhood, as Byatt
suggests, is partly a desire for pattern and substance. The novel charts
how much the divide between childhood and adulthood resides in
expectations: adults and children know that the evolution of childhood
is to grow up, but once that maturing has taken place there is no map
to follow. The period’s regression is located firmly by Byatt in the drive
to write children’s literature in England, to turn adult writers into the
children they once were, so that reference is made to Kenneth Graeme’s
‘baby talk’ (395) to his wife (he was forty, she ‘a girlish thirty-seven year
old’) and even Baden-Powell, who, aged 47, proposed to a girl of 18,
and ‘was fascinated by Peter Pan which he saw twice’ (395). The sinister
edge to Byatt’s comments here on the men who seek to capture children
in order to redeem something about their own childhoods depends on
the balance of information: Graeme’s ‘grown-up job’ was in the Bank of
England, while the army’s Baden-Powell ‘would travel many miles, and
cross frontiers’ to be able to watch an execution (395). In contrast, Byatt
writes that ‘[i]n Germany, there were theories of children and childhood’
(395). That Byatt selects two nations which less than a decade later
would be destroying their barely adult armies in the First World War
is more than a signal to the reader able to look backwards of what lies
ahead. This is about Byatt constructing a glass which looks ‘[b]ackwards
and forwards, both’ but which also reveals the contradictory nature of
these portraits of individuals, genres and nations. It is a demonstration
of the illusion behind Eliot’s ‘concentric arrangement . . . light falling
with an exclusive optical selection’, and behind our attempt to place such

patternings on to the past for the sake of narrative form and the comfort
of story. In her focus on the museum as a place of secular worship, Byatt
also raises a question about what we want to see in that display case
world: exploring the museum space at the start of the novel, the children
‘crept down the uneven stone steps, holding a thin iron rail. At the foot

of the staircase they found themselves cut off by a metal grille, beyond
which stretched a long corridor, now vaguely visible as though there was
a light source at the other end. The passage was roofed with Gothic vault-
ing, like a church crypt, but finished in white glaze industrial bricks’ (6).
The conjunction of Gothic and industrial, the secular temple and yet
the vaguely epiphanic ‘light source at the other end’, furnishes Byatt’s
text with that ambiguous sense of unbelief and faith located in ideas
of progress, modernity, and the backwards-forwards looking moment.
It also provides a conjecture which, along with that sense of knowing
one comes after something, seems to haunt part of our negotiation of
the Victorian past. In telling us a children’s story – or rather a series
of children’s stories – about a period unsure of its own identity except
in relation to its post-Victorian status, Byatt might be seen to turn the
spotlight on her contemporary reader, who stands peering at the display
case glass that has itself become a mirror.
4.3 ‘A pure-Victorian half-made window’: Rachel

Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008)32
While Byatt’s book engages with the turn-of-the-century nostalgia for

the childhood sense of comfort no longer accessible in adulthood,
Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter relocates this theme within
a dual-time narrative of the mid-1990s and 1870s. The story revolves
around Fran Morrison in the contemporary period, the daughter of the
title’s glass painter, who returns from her global musical career when
her father is taken into hospital. Edward Morrison is the proprietor
of the Minster Glass stained-glass window shop tucked away in the
London district of Westminster, close to the cathedral and several other
religious locations. The company, which has been ‘in business since
1865’ (31), was established and developed ‘at a time when coloured
glass was all the rage again’ (35). The influence of Pugin, the Gothic
revival, Victorian medievalism, William Morris and, in particular, John
Ruskin’s views on Gothic as an authentic religious or spiritual style33
are brought out in the novel alongside a more dominating sense of the
connections between the glass-making and stained-glass production
processes and the study of the angels which appear in such glasses.

For in the novel the angel is a form of ghost or spectre made of glass.
The angelology theme is explored via quotations from, among others,
Edward Burne-Jones, William Blake, Emily Brontë, Thomas Carlyle,
Coventry Patmore (the somewhat inevitable ‘angel of the house’),34
and in particular Cardinal John Henry Newman’s poem The Dream of

Gerontius (1865). What connects these different strands is the dualistic
nature of belief and faith within the narrative, and the fabric of such
spirituality as located in the image of the angel in the stained glass.
During her investigations around the shop and the flat above it, in
which she has not lived for several years, Fran begins to reconstruct
her relationship with her absent father principally through attempt-
ing to piece together the project he was working on when he fell ill.
In contradistinction to the narratives we discussed in Chapter 1, it is
the patrilinear heritage which provides the focus here. Fran imagines
her father ‘writing a history’ of the company (33) and pictures him
‘too meticulous . . . sitting up in his attic alone for hour upon hour,
like Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch’ (35). Invoking Eliot’s failed scholar
at this early stage suggests the ways in which Fran’s relationship with
Edward is problematized at this point: she is dismissive of the life
devoted to the craft of glass, as if it is somehow less substantial than
her own career in music, not recognizing that both are about patterns,
breath, and the displacement of human contact. However, what Fran
comes to discover is that rather than the sterility of Casaubon’s Key
to All Mythologies, the history of Minister Glass her father was recon-
structing is far more precise and manageable, focussing as it does on
the restoration of one specific window’s original construction. The
window in question is in St Martin’s Church, Westminster, where the
‘stone over the porch proclaimed its foundation in 1851’ (31). 1851
was of course the year of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace,
perhaps the ultimate representation of the secular glass temple of the
Victorian period, a building full of commodities and things. But it
was also a high point for the stained-glass revival in the nineteenth
century with twenty-five glass company exhibitioners at the event.35
As Fran discovers during the course of the narrative, ‘Minster Glass
had been responsible for [the St Martin’s window] creation back in
Victorian times’ (10), and Hore taps into the idea of the revival of
stained glass in the nineteenth century and the restoration of those
Victorian productions in the contemporary period as the central trope
of the story. Glass, the novel appears to suggest, is at its most resilient
precisely because most fragile, is most angelic and heavenly when
most earthly and human.

While Fran begins to reconstruct the narrative of the stained glass

made by her family’s company in 1870, she also pieces together aspects
of her own history. Using journals, business papers, and other materi-
als she finds both in the Minster Glass archive and through the help
of the local vicar, Reverend Jeremy Quentin, who had commissioned

her father to undertake the research, Fran traces the story of a love
affair between Laura, the daughter of a previous vicar in the parish,
Reverend Brownlow, and the designer of the original window, Philip
Russell. By the end of the book, Fran has reached a conclusion famil-
iar to readers of Possession, in which she is the link between different
generations of the story and family history: ‘Laura, married to Philip,
was my great-great-great-grandmother. Her son Samuel, born in 1882,
had married Reuben Ashe’s grand-daughter, so Reuben was my ances-
tor, too’ (435). While the ending’s sense of tying up the loose ends of
the dual-time narrative might seem to echo Byatt’s novel (and, indeed,
Reuben Ashe, the founder of the company, might be a conscious echo
of Byatt’s Randolph Henry Ash), what the novel achieves in relation to
the motifs of stained glass and angels is worth further comment here
because it reaches far beyond what might otherwise be considered a
conventional neo-Victorian romance plot.
The Victorian writer Laura Brownlow’s faith in the idea of the aes-
thetic, in particular the artist Philip Russell’s ability to bring the figure
of her dead sister to life through stained glass in the Victorian narrative,
and Fran Morrison’s own belief in the power of research and evidence
are united in a sense of the force of John of Damascus’s words (cited
as the epigraph to chapter 4 in the novel) that angels are ‘intelligent
reflections of light, that original light which has no beginning’ (37).
There is a potential play here in that the individual vertical divisions of
stained-glass windows are known as ‘lights’,36 but what is more relevant
is the sense of light as revelatory in spiritual terms. As the novel con-
tinues, it becomes clear that the chapter epigraphs are little homilies or
themes for the chapters themselves. Like the biblical texts which pro-
vide Jeremy Quentin with the inspiration for his sermons (and indeed
so served Laura’s father a century before), the novel presents us with a
secularized conjunction of Victorian faith and contemporary spiritual
desire. Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, the prayer of a dying
man and the responses of both an angel and a devil to his soul’s prayer,
thus functions as both the representation of a Victorian text caught up
in the devotional power of the idea of angels that runs parallel to that
provided in the form of stained glass, and as an illustration of the secu-
larization of that religious vision in our own period. The church choir at

St Martin’s, which Fran joins, is preparing a performance of Newman’s

poem as adapted by Elgar for his oratorio of the same name in 1900.
Fran’s participation in the rehearsals and performance thus becomes a
means by which she can be a voice to her now silent but dying father’s
soul in his hospital bed, just as she will complete his research into the

stained glass. The return to Minister Glass marks a kind of return of
Fran’s own soul or faith in the idea of human relationships, at least.
The vicar wants to use a recent charitable bequest to the church to
restore the window; as he puts it, ‘Stained glass is important. The win-
dows are such an aid to worship, I find. In medieval times, coloured
glass was said to inspire visions of ecstasy’ (48). It is the aid to her own
understanding of her current predicament which Fran finds in both
the church windows and the research into their history. At first, Fran
has difficulty picking up the research of her father because it remains
unclear what the 1870s stained glass did represent; however, it is not
long before she does confirm that the ‘broken window was definitely
an angel. At last I had found a thread leading into the past. A thread
which, if I pulled, might begin to unravel a story’ (70). But what Fran
uncovers in her research, beside her family’s narrative and her familial
connection to the window itself, is a Victorian story about religious
conflict concerning the representation of faith. The previous incumbent
at St Martin’s, Laura’s father and one of the Reverend Quentin’s long
dead predecessors as well as the man who commissioned the original
window in memory of Laura’s dead sister, had been the victim of abuse
and persecution by members of his congregation because of the high
church implications of the stained-glass window. In this way, Hore’s
text provides a subtle comment on the reductive nature of our readings
of the Victorians’ confidence in and consensus about faith and belief,
and the use of the Newman poem also alludes to this idea, evoking as it
does the period of division in both religion and religious representation.
As Jeremy the vicar comments, ‘I like to think of angels as a symbol
of everything that is beyond our ordinary perception and understand-
ing of the world; part of the universal song of praise that surrounds us
always’ (284). This might sound like the kind of ‘metaphysical charm’
treated with some irony in Byatt’s novel,37 but in Hore’s there is a sense
in which the stained-glass window simultaneously remains imbued
with the faith of the past and functions as a non-religious record of
the contemporary’s relationship to the historical. Although the novel
does not theorize or conceptualize the nature of that encounter, there
remains a connectiveness between the periods which provide the
book’s structure, and a demonstration that while the purposes of such

buildings as churches and such religious art as stained glass might

change, this does not in itself eradicate the meaning or experience
of those locations and objects in the present. To a degree, Hore’s is a
Ruskinian view of the relationship between memory and architecture
or the fabric of buildings such as stained-glass windows. Writing in The

Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Ruskin states that
Memory may truly said to be the Sixth Lamp of Architecture; for

it is in becoming memorial or monumental that a true perfection
is attained by civil and domestic buildings; and this partly as they
are, with such a view, built in a more stable manner, and partly as
their decorations are consequently animated by a metaphorical or
historical meaning.38
In this sense, Hore’s text provides a contrary reading to Byatt’s The

Children’s Book with its display case culture and the simultaneously
distancing and enhancing nature of the object, the fabric of the past
as connected to its aesthetic remains. Hore’s novel, conversely, suggests
that the distanced object, when restored, as in the case of the stained-
glass window of St Martin’s, increases in meaning and clarity, indeed
it becomes the ‘decoration’ which is imbued with ‘metaphorical or
historical meaning’; the restoration also negates part of the problem
associated with the dislocation of the historical object from its context
as outlined in the comment from Charles Saumarez Smith. Leaving the
historical record in situ is seen in Hore’s novel to enhance its context
and extend it without disrupting its signification for either period. The
mystery and story Fran Morrison traces, indeed, provide added context
to the original window and do not sacrifice this to the contemporary
fabric which constitutes its reconstructed form. The ‘lights’ of the win-
dow therefore do serve multiple functions, representing the point at
which the visions of past, present, and future might meet.
4.4 ‘[T]here may be some truth in those tales’:

John Harwood’s The Séance (2008)39
The connectiveness between past and present and the idea of the spec-
tral as a virtual embodiment of that coexistence between living and
dead is fundamental to the way in which we look through that distort-
ing glass back to the Victorians. Indeed, what we might be seeking in
the spectral summoning up of the Victorian narrative in contemporary
fiction is precisely such distortion, both of our own period and that

of the nineteenth century. Two recent novels by the novelist John

Harwood underline the tensions we are trying to articulate concerning
the relationship between the spectral, the scriptural (in both religious
and authorial senses), and the spiritual. The Ghost Writer (2004), which
we discussed in Chapter 1, and The Séance (2008) are both texts that

explore the ways in which individuals seek to make a connection with
the past through narrative, and how the desire to acknowledge and
even embrace the sense of being haunted is frequently re-enacted at a
textual level. They are also novels about faith at different levels.
The Ghost Writer’s Gerard Freeman discovers a manuscript, ‘a thick
bundle of pages with typewriting on them, tied together with rusty
black ribbon’ in his mother’s room. Gerard notes that ‘[a]s I drew out
the bundle, a photograph slid into my lap.’40 This photograph proves just
as important as the manuscript because of the way it stimulates Gerard’s
interest in his maternal history. As such, it represents the visual and
textual as spectral combination that releases an uncanny sense of the real
captured in the imagined. Gerard’s narrative voice comments that ‘the
woman in the photograph was calm and beautiful and alive, more alive
than anyone I had ever seen in a picture’ (5), and we are reminded of
the Victorian attraction to photography as a means of containing
and not just representing an aspect of the spirit. Such echoes of the
nineteenth century in a text partly set in contemporary Australia and
London and partly figured through 1890s literature, are layered at a
textual as well as visual level. The novel plays with the invocation of
symbolic acts of naming. Like the reader, Gerard, himself a bookish child,
is haunted by the presence of earlier textual women, Lewis Carroll’s Alice
and Henry James’s Miss Jessel, conjured up in the name of Gerard’s pen
friend, Alice Jessell. Blurring in the imagination both his real friend
and the fictional character, Gerard presents us with a mirror to our
own annotative awareness of the past signalled in such acts of homage.
Alice will later write to Gerard that she does not ‘want to be fixed by a
picture’ (25), so that the surrogacies of the imagination have to stand
in for reality.
Gerard’s account of his delvings into his family history, the releasing
death of his mother, and his burgeoning relationship with Alice through
letters, whose textuality will prove fundamental to the unlocking of the
inherited mystery in a cryptomimetic manner, are interleaved with a
series of Vernon Lee-esque short stories written by his great-grandmother
which conjure up late-Victorian Gothic. What transpires is the realiza-
tion when Gerard comes to London and finds the Hatherley house that
the tales are not fictions but histories in the sense that they provide him

with the investigative and interpretative clues. The narrative reveals that
it is not the supernatural but the scientific, not the past or its literature
but the more modern technology of the early-twentieth century, that are
at the root of the Hatherley family story. As such, Harwood’s text enacts
a kind of double cross on the reader: see(k)ing the dread pleasures of the

pastiche Victorian ghost story, we are instead confronted with a spectral
fabrication, a slippage between the narrative desires in which we place so
much faith and suspended disbelief and the more terrifying technological
realities of the modern world. It is gamma rays rather than the Gothic
which does for the characters in this novel, just as it is the guns in French
trenches that shatter the glass gardens in Byatt’s The Children’s Book.
In this sense one might draw a comparison between what the neo-
Victorian novelist seeks to do in narrative returns back to the fractured
faith of the Victorians and the work of the critic George Levine. Levine,
at the outset of his 2006 book Darwin Loves You, which is about Darwin
and contemporary society, states that ‘Evolution by natural selection
seems to have removed both meaning and consolation from the world;
those who discovered it and who now argue for it often engage in a
kind of triumphal rationalism that treads all affective and extramate-
rial explanation underfoot. It is one thing to believe that science can
explain the movement of the stars or even the composition of matter;
it is quite another to believe that science can explain human nature
itself, and all the disorderly intricacies of human life.’41 Levine’s state-
ments on the issue of re-enchantment in particular highlight a poten-
tial connection with the need publicly to rethink the Victorians’ own
relationship to religion and science, faith and doubt. The neo-Victorian
novel itself often runs the danger of debunking faith without the kind
of subtleties and nuances of thought and rationality that are frequently
emblematic of the nineteenth century’s own debates on these matters.
Harwood’s text and the narrator’s concluding realization of the magni-
tude of his self-deception might thus reflect something about our own
delusions in the faith we place in the neo-Victorian text and in many
respects its too-comforting treatment of the spectral. Like the Victorian
fraudster mediums pulling out all the stops in the hoax séance, we are
complicit in the fakery of the text and its summoning of the haunted
and haunting past.
Harwood’s second novel, The Séance, is more firmly set in the
Victorian period but this still allows for a set of spectral and textual
tricks to take place in his revisioning of the trope of the haunted man-
sion. Divided between four first-person accounts of different stages in
the mystery surrounding Wraxford Hall and its history of alchemical,

necromancing and mesmerist inhabitants, Harwood’s text is at its most

knowing when it plays with our rationalized response to the Victorians’
obsession with spiritualism and the afterlife. Thus the central female
figure and first/last narrator, Constance Langton, writes of her atheist
father’s disapproval of the tenets of spiritualism: ‘I had already begun

to suspect that Papa did not believe in God . . . [when] I discovered that
the book he had been writing for so long was called Rational Foundations
of Morality’ (12). Mr Langton’s book is designed to demonstrate that
one should behave morally irrespective of the existence of God or an
afterlife, something Constance thinks is common sense. It is also some-
thing that we are encouraged to endorse in the sense that the narrative
positions us to hold on to our own rationalist, post-modern and post-
Christian perspectives on such matters. Yet Langton’s rationalist ethics
is undermined very early on with his decision to leave his wife and
daughter. At this point, the text almost suggests that cool rationalism is
what destabilizes human interaction, rather than the less harmful faith
in spirits and the beyond.
As with The Ghost Writer, reading plays a key function in the narrative
not only as we bring together the diverse range of stories but also in the
earliest descriptions of Constance’s life. She views her childhood world
as a ‘kind of limbo state in which I was free to read whatever I wished,
and walk wherever I wanted, whilst at the same time feeling that nobody
would care if I vanished from the face of the earth’ (12). Constance thus
presents herself very much as a spectre, and later in the novel read-
ing and mesmerism almost go together in the metatextual comment
that ‘[i]n the deepest state of trance . . . a subject could be instructed to
see scenes and persons who were not actually present’ (71). It is hard
not to read this as a statement about narrative and the textual nature
of the spectral along the lines of some of the earlier material we have
discussed. Mesmerism is closely aligned to the idea of reading in this
text, with Magnus Wraxford, the key spiritualist of the novel, described
by his future wife Eleanor Unwin as having ‘a slightly Mephistophelean
air, and dark eyes of remarkable luminosity. Though George had said he
was handsome, the sheer force of his presence took me by surprise. The
saying that eyes are the windows of the soul flitted across my mind as I
extended my hand, but I had the discomfiting sensation, as our fingers
touched, that my own soul had become momentarily transparent to his
gaze’ (109). Reflection and observation are central once more, but within
this broad conceptualization of the power of the séance is, as in The
Ghost Writer, an emphasis on science and trickery. While necromancy,
mesmerism, the ‘morbid fear of death’ and ‘the alchemists’ quest for the

elixir of life’ (58) are presented as themes throughout the novel, they are
always delivered in a tone of knowing scepticism.
As readers we are regularly encouraged to invoke both scepticism
and faith in Constance’s narrative and those she assembles from other
characters such as the respectable village solicitor John Montague.

Early in the text Constance confesses to us that she has faked spiritual
trances. One of the reasons for her father’s departure is the obsessive
nature of his wife’s hankering for communication from their dead
child, Constance’s sister. After Langton’s desertion, Constance pre-
tends to enter a trance in order to reassure her mother of her dead
sister’s happiness in the world beyond. But the performance proves
too strongly convincing for Mrs Langton and she commits suicide to
rejoin her child in paradise, leaving a note beside her ‘empty bottle
of laudanum . . . which read, “Forgive me – I could not wait”’ (31).
Harwood’s ironic comment on the desire to place faith in the easily
ventriloquized and faux-authentic contact between the living and
the dead is also a reflection upon our own readerly yearning for the
Victorian novel itself. Just as Harwood speaks through Constance and
the other narrative voices, so his characters in turn imitate their parts
from older Victorian narratives. Harwood even begins his novel with
a paratextual nod towards the fakery via an epigraph from Revelations
of a Spirit Medium (1891), a real text from the period, which explains
how to ‘manifest a spirit’ using silk in ‘a darkened room’ (n.p.).42 There
is thus a kind of suggestiveness about the functions of the spectral in
these texts and Harwood’s awareness of the late-Victorian questioning
of spiritualism, the truths it might reveal, and also the investigations
into the faked performance of such séances via bodies such as the
Society for Psychical Research. Is Harwood asking us to place our faith
in his novel’s ability to mimic, medium-like, the period in which it
is set? Or is he instead asking us to think about why we continue to
wish these spirits to be summoned before us? Writing on Byatt’s paired
neo-Victorian novellas published as Angels & Insects (1992), Hilary
Schor comments that ‘Byatt, like any brave New Historicist, is trying
to talk with the dead.’43 In contrast we argue that the works explored
in this chapter use ghosts and the spectral to talk with the living.
Metafictional texts, by their very nature, are more about the moment
of their writing than the setting of that writing, and metahistorical
novels, the genre into which the most interesting and stimulating
neo-Victorian fiction falls, are as much concerned with the historical
moment that is now than they are with the nineteenth century. By
casting the fiction and the fakery of the séance, of the ghost and of the

spectral itself back to us as contemporary readers, Harwood and others

are multi-layering the notion of textual haunting, and possibly even
challenging our ‘faith’ in the postmodern text and its own séance-like
trickeries.
Towards the end of Harwood’s novel our attention is turned to Whitby

and the discovery of the truth of the mystery. As the site of Dracula’s
landing, Whitby is of course an ideal location. The town where the
classic representative of the undead and vampiric arrives in England is
suitably ironic as the home of the woman everyone believes to be either
dead or a murderess in Harwood’s text. But this knowingness – our
knowledge when reading this neo-Victorian fiction of the appropriate-
ness of this location’s literary significance for a late-Victorian reader
eight years after the latest narrative within this novel is set – is part of
the spectral show. For what it hints towards is that imperceptible but
ever present spirit behind the best of the neo-Victorian genre of our
desire to be tricked, of wanting to suspend disbelief and placing faith in
the narrative dexterity that is only ever a patterning of concentric cir-
cles on the glass. While Wolfreys’s views on the spectral may be correct
for a reading of the Victorians and Castricano’s ‘cryptomimetic’ theory
is evidently supported by these texts, neither truly accommodates the
sense of s(p)ecular faith we place into the novels themselves, and our
presence at the table rapping as both spirit and believer.
4.5 Conclusion
Just as neo-Victorian writers are eager to explore (and one might even
say exploit) the popular perception of the late-nineteenth century
as the age of the séance, of spiritualists and mediums, and of arcane
returns to mysteries of religious practice and faith in the possibility of
immortality, so too they must indicate scepticism and knowingness
towards any such ideas. The repeated invocation of Victorian spiritual-
ism, mesmerism, and mediumship in these texts is striking even when
the conclusion emphasizes that the spirit realm is a false consolation
for a period grappling with disparate theories of the world embodied in
religion and science. Novels such as those by Byatt and Hore, which do
not conjure up spiritualism and the figure of the medium, still are per-
vaded by an abiding sense of the complicated desire to communicate
with the dead as part of our collective yearning to know something,
to have a sense of revelation, of what lies beyond our own existence.
Configured through the image of the display case or the stained-glass
window, these novels also address the question of our engagement

with the past and the contrary dialectic between periods and differing
notions of faith. For the Victorians it was the possibility of an afterlife
which sustained a form of belief that moved from religious orthodoxy
and the church to spiritualism and the séance. For us the communion
with the dead takes place via the neo-Victorian novel, and what we

seek is less the confirmation of a world beyond the visible reality of
daily life and more the comfort of narrative solace, textual salvation,
and redemptive writing. The metafictional possibilities for writers to
provide a subtle commentary on their own practice in summoning the
Victorians in contemporary fiction are clear. What becomes less dis-
tinct in that misted-over glass is whether these anxious alliances with a
Victorian tradition of the unexplained, the ghostly, and the secular fas-
cination with the spirit world are consciously attempting to underline
the spectral and, in essence, ‘faked’ nature of the neo-Victorian text.
Do these novels coax us with their hoaxes, just as the Selina Dawes of
the 1870s to 1910s duped a susceptible public eager for ghosts? Or do
they constitute a comment on the need to believe, to look back and to
be reassured that the past lives on, continually keeping those Victorian
shadows part of our present?
Ultimately, these texts all present us with an uneasy sense of the
Victorians looking forward to us just as much as we look back towards
to them, and indicate, however fleetingly, the potential substantiveness
of those spectres in the glass. The awkward fear of religiosity or faith, the
exploration of true existential crises is not necessarily at the root of the
presence of (or possibility of) the phantasmagoric in the contemporary
text. Instead, writers are demonstrating an increasing sensitivity to the
idea that their publications are the equivalent now of the séances and
communications with the dead then. Through pastiche and re-visioning,
through the mesmeric nature of re-reading, the ghost writers of the
present are playing an ambiguous game with a contemporary readership
hungry for the summoned spirit of a Victorian fiction they believe in.
And yet, as a character in Harwood’s second novel puts it, ‘Truly it is
said, that he who attends a séance in the medium’s house is asking to
be deceived’ (237). It is the nature of our desire for a readerly and visual
deception that provides the focus of our discussion in Chapter 5.

5
Doing It with Mirrors, or Tricks
of the Trade: Neo-Victorian

Metatextual Magic
Metafiction . . . self-consciously and systematically

draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to
pose questions about the relationship between fiction
and reality.
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (1984)1
When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia

assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths
of origin and of signs of reality. . . . Escalation of the
true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative
where the object and substance have disappeared . . .
this is how simulation appears . . . a strategy of the
real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal . . . We require
a visible past, a visible continuum, visible myth of
origin, which reassures us about our end.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulacrum (1984)2
[C]onjurors’ writings . . . should be seen as . . . essentially

‘performative’: as emulating and extending the stage
act; as consisting of a sequence of gestures designed
to misdirect the reader’s attention, to say one thing
while doing another; and as repeatedly performing
that quintessential conjuror’s routine of appearing to
explain the trick while actually doing no such thing.
Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts (2007)3
The previous chapter explored the theme of spectrality and haunting as

metaphor for the influence the Victorian continues to hold over the
contemporary imagination and the ways in which neo-Victorian texts
174

Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic 175
encourage us to reflect on this influence. The focus of this chapter is

again on the genre’s metafictionality, but here we examine the relation-
ship between neo-Victorian author and reader as one that resembles
that between conjuror and spectator. Neo-Victorian texts, we argue,
self-consciously mimic the strategies of Victorian stage magic in order

to entangle us in a performance of illusionism. Metafictional neo-
Victorianism is fuelled and sustained by textual illusion: the fabrication
of a ‘plausible’ version of the Victorian past and a ‘credible’ represen-
tation of the places, characters, and experiences depicted in the text.
As a sub-genre of postmodernist fiction neo-Victorianism, when at its
most sophisticated, is self-referential, engaging the reader in a game
about its historical veracity and (inter)textuality, and inviting reflec-
tions on its metafictional playfulness. If metafiction, as Patricia Waugh
notes, calls attention to its counterfeit status, then neo-Victorian or, in
Linda Hutcheon’s terms, historiographic metafiction4 stages its artefac-
tual condition in order to challenge our desire for ‘reality’ and ‘truth’,
dramatizing the essential constructedness of history and historiography.
The position of the neo-Victorian author, and film maker, can then be
compared to that of a conjuror: like the audience of a stage magician
we know from the start that it’s all an act, but judge the quality of the
performance by its ability to deceive and mystify us. A conjuror, as the
master of Victorian stage illusion, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, famously
noted, is ‘an actor playing the part of a magician’.5 Actor, conjuror, and
neo-Victorian author/director all strive for a compelling performance
with the power to dazzle and captivate.
Just as nineteenth-century magicians’ invocation of spiritualist
manifestations relied on the use of magic lanterns or angled mirrors
projecting on to the stage the reflections of hidden actors operating
behind screens or below stairs,6 so contemporary neo-Victorianism too
plays with mirrors to lure us into suspending disbelief. In his cultural
history of magic, Performing Dark Arts, Michael Mangan draws analogies
between the stage acts and ‘performative writing’ of conjurors and the
strategies of postmodernist fiction and film.7 Misdirection – the opening
ploy of every trick, which consists in showing while hiding (obscuring
how the illusion works by distracting the audience’s attention with
the stage set or lengthy scientific or philosophical elucidations) – is as
central to the art of the neo-Victorian writer and film director as to that
of the conjuror. The stratagem of misdirection and the mise-en-scène of
an illusion can be related to Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernist concept of
simulation and hyperreality. Baudrillard uses the example of the theme
park – Disneyland; a more specifically neo-Victorian paradigm would be

Dickens World, as discussed in our concluding chapter – to argue that

in its very inauthenticity the simulacrum, once it has assumed reality
function in our imagination, serves to mask the more general inauthen-
ticity (hyperreality) of the world in which we live: ‘Disneyland exists in
order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is

Disneyland’.8 This process of raising the doubly artifical to the status of
‘reality’ in order to hide the hyperreality (artefactuality) of the original
Baudrillard calls a ‘simulation of the third order’.9 Neo-Victorian fiction
and film adapts Baudrillard by engaging us in a game of hide and seek,
in which the deceptions in which the characters ensnare each other
conceal even as they reveal the textual and visual deceits practised on
reader and spectator, creating third-order simulations which aim to trick
and then spectacularly undeceive us in our desire to capture the ‘reality’
of the Victorian worlds created.
In this chapter, therefore, we draw on Mangan’s thoughts on the
‘performative writing’ of illusionists and Baudrillard’s concept of ‘simu-
lation and simulacra’ to examine how a number of contemporary novels
and films mimic Victorian conjuring techniques in order to interrogate
our fantasies as well as our blind-spots. Among the texts to be discussed
here are Sarah Waters’s intellectually most complex novel, Affinity
(1999), whose invitation to identify with the first-person narrator leads
us into overlooking the class-related clues to the story’s mystery; Scarlett
Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006), in which Baudrillard’s theory of the
simulacrum and hyperreality are associated with Victorian thought
experiments and the conjectures of quantum physics; and Steven
Millhauser’s emblematic exploration of the conjuror’s (writer’s) craft in
his story ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990). We begin and end with two
metadramatic films of 2006 about Victorian stage magic: Christopher
Nolan’s The Prestige and Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (adapted from
Millhauser’s story), which represent the neo-Victorian conjuring trick
as a play in three acts: misdirection (the pledge of authenticity made
towards the audience), the magic turn (the surprise, such as the disap-
pearance of an object or a person), and the ‘prestige’:10 in stage magic
the illusion itself, in neo-Victorianism the revelation of the trick.
This dramatic structure is sometimes encoded paratextually on the
book cover or in the title sequence. Thus the paperback cover (Figure 5.1)
of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006), a novel discussed in
Chapter 1, presents us with a frontal view of two girls shown from
the waist downwards in identical outfits (white dresses, black shoes),
their only difference appearing to be in the positioning of the hands.
This, then, is to be a story of two girls, two sisters, possibly twins; or is it?

Figure 5.1 Paperback cover of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (London:
Orion, 2006), reproduced by permission of the Orion Publishing Group

The pledge tendered by the image is destabilized by the titular reference to

a crucial agent: the thirteenth tale. Thirteen, as readers know, is the number
of oddness as of magic (reminding us of the uninvited guest in the fairytale
who exacts revenge). The impression of a mystery to be unravelled is further
heightened by the reviewer’s blurb underneath the title. As we discover

early on (chapter 3) the thirteenth tale is conspicuous by its absence. The
enigmatic relationship between the girls and the (uncertain, missing) story
is key to the ‘twists and turns’, the story inside the covers. The ‘prestige’ to
be revealed to us at the end of the text is encrypted on the spine and the
back cover’s display of a single girl, in white with black shoes, standing
alone, depicted from the knees downwards (Figure 5. 2). Initially this might
be taken to be one of the girls figured on the front. It is only after reading
the novel that we realize that the front and back covers perform a similar
misdirection as the text does by exhibiting while disguising the third sister:
a sleight of hand hinted at in her hidden hands.
Similarly, Nolan’s title sequence draws attention to the three magic acts
through headings (‘The Pledge’, ‘The Turn’, ‘The Prestige’) illustrated with
a revolving board showing in alternation an empty cage and a cage
with a bird, while two different birds are flying off the screen dropping
feathers. The bird in (and out of) the cage image is an important clue for
understanding the magic tricks of the protagonists as well as a metaphor
for their plight: ‘Who cares for the man in the box?’, one of them will
exclaim at the culmination point of the film.11
5.1 ‘Are you watching closely?’: Christopher Nolan’s

The Prestige (2006)12
Adapted from Christopher Priest’s 1995 eponymous novel, The Prestige

provides a striking, even chilling, metaphor for the imaginative and per-
formative acts of contemporary neo-Victorianism. Text and film revolve
around the embittered professional and personal rivalry between, and
mutual destruction of, two Victorian magicians, Robert (in the novel
Rupert) Angier (played by Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian
Bale). Their names are emblematic of their profession, Angier’s evok-
ing the world of dreams (‘anges’) conjured up by the magician, while
‘Borden’ hints at the crossing of ‘borders’, the boundary work involved
in performing illusions. One of the underlying causes of their antag-
onism is their profoundly different approach, reflecting competing
camps in Victorian magic: the ‘skilled artists’ who excelled at sleight of
hand (but risked being dismissed as mere ‘jugglers’) as opposed to what
Robert-Houdin called ‘the “false bottom” school of conjuring’, who

Figure 5.2 Paperback back cover of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (London:
Orion, 2006), reproduced by permission of the Orion Publishing Group

primarily relied on machinery.13 In Priest’s novel Borden belittles Angier

for his ‘fundamentally flawed and limited understanding of magical
technique’: he fails to grasp that ‘[t]he wonder of magic lies not in the
technical secret, but in the skill with which it is performed.’14 While
Angier’s pièce de resistance is indeed entirely a question of technology,

ironically Borden’s leading act is itself contingent on circumstances
other than mere skill. In the film the enmity between the two charac-
ters originates from a tragic accident when Borden, by tying the wrong
kind of knot, caused the death by drowning in a water-filled cabinet of
Angier’s assistant and wife. Angier later attempts to sabotage Borden’s
performances and imitates his most celebrated act, ‘The Transported
Man’, which consists of the magician entering a cabinet at one end of
the stage while instantly re-emerging from another at the opposite end,
catching the ball he had started to bounce across the stage. With the
help of the ingenious Eastern-European scientist Nikola Tesla (a real-
life inventor, here played by David Bowie)15 Angier acquires a quasi-
Frankensteinian electrical apparatus which enables him to outperform
Borden. His star act is called ‘In a Flash’ and involves his disappearance
in the midst of electric explosions, only to make a spectacular reappear-
ance seconds later among the audience on one of the balconies. One
day, however, his performance goes wrong when he drops through a
stage trap door into a tank filled with water and drowns. Borden, who
made his way backstage and into the basement in order to discover
the secret of Angier’s trick, arrives to see his rival trapped in the tank.
Found at the scene and convicted of having plotted Angier’s murder by
having contrived to move the tank underneath the trap door, Borden is
sentenced to death.
There is of course more than one trick and turn to the story of the two
magicians, and one of these is to present the audience with parts of the
explanation of Angier’s secret at the very beginning. The film starts with
Harry Cutter, Angier’s designer of illusions (played by Michael Caine),
describing the three constitutive parts of every magic trick to a young
girl (whom we later identify as Borden’s daughter):
[The anonymous voiceover (indicated in italics) addresses the specta-

tor while Cutter performs a magic dis/reappearance trick with a budgie
to a girl; in the background Angier is shown staging ‘In a Flash’] Are
you watching closely? – [Cutter’s voiceover.] Every magic trick consists
of three parts or acts. The first part is called the pledge. It’s where the
magician shows you something ordinary, a deck of cards, a bird, or
a man. [Cutter produces a cage with a bird in it; Angier’s assistant

asks for volunteers from the audience, who – with Borden in disguise
among them – proceed to examine Angier’s magical apparatus.] He
shows you this object, perhaps he asks you to inspect it, to see that it
is indeed real, normal. But of course it probably isn’t. [While the vol-
unteers return to their seats, Borden moves backstage.] The second

act is called the turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and
makes it do something extraordinary. [Cutter makes the budgie and
cage disappear while, apparently hit by electrical currents, Angier
vanishes from the stage.] Now you are looking for the secret but you
won’t find it because you’re not really looking. You don’t really want
to know. You want to be fooled. [Borden arrives in the basement,
moves past a blind man sitting in front of a water tank, and witnesses
Angier dropping into the tank.] But you wouldn’t clap yet. [The girl
grows confused, while the audience in the background is becoming
restless as there is no sign of Angier.] Because making something dis-
appear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. [Cutter presents the
missing bird to the girl, who starts clapping.] That’s why every magic
trick has a third act: the hardest part, the part we call the prestige.
[A bewildered and horrified Borden watches Angier struggle for life.]
(00:42–03:12)16
‘Are you watching closely?’ Repeated twice more, this question evidently
issues a challenge. From the outset we are invited to reflect on our per-
ception of events while enjoying the Freudian game of fort/da.17 In his
‘Special Features’ Nolan refers to the affinities between magician and
film director,18 stressing that he wants viewers to pick up on the meta-
filmic dimension: The Prestige is ‘very much about film-making . . . It’s
also intended to suggest . . . how the film itself is spooling its narrative
out to the audience. We want people really to be aware of the effect the
film is having on them as it’s unfolding before their eyes’ (0:17–0:42).
This can be applied to the neo-Victorian fiction author.19 A novel like
Affinity, as we shall see, shows us all the props and still succeeds in
making us overlook the crucial details: the Millbank Prison, spiritualist
and lesbian coming-out plots serve to obscure the meticulously choreo-
graphed deceptions carried out right in front of our eyes. If we were not
taken in by the decoy story, we would pick up all the clues, as we do on
second reading. Similarly, The Prestige plays with our blindness in the
face of the insights we are given early on about how Borden and Angier’s
tricks might work. Cutter insists that Borden’s act must rely on a double,
but Angier’s persistent disbelief clouds our judgement; and while a child
is instantly and painfully aware of the cruelty that lies beneath the bird

dis/reappearance trick (the bird on display is crushed by the collapsing

cage; the ‘recovery’ produces a second bird that had been hidden in the
folds of the cloth), we remain impervious to its allegorical nature as an
indication of Angier’s later stunt. Another important early clue is the
revelation of the secret of a prominent magician, Chung Ling Soo (a his-

torical figure), who relies on a permanent deception (of physical frailty)
which, in order to sustain his act (of conjuring up a weighty glass bowl
from his robe), must be maintained in his private life too; and yet we do
not make any inferences about Borden’s changeable behaviour which
so troubles his wife. A further context to the two magicians and their
rivalry, as well as to the game with ‘original’ and ‘copy’, is Chung Ling
Soo’s imposture of another Chinese magician, Ching Ling Foo, whose
stunts he appropriated, just as Angier does Borden’s.20
Like The Prestige, some neo-Victorian fictions explicitly articulate a
‘pledge’ as the opening gambit of the trick. Thus Michael Cox’s The
Meaning of Night (2006) begins with an Editor’s Preface authored by a
Cambridge professor, who assures the reader that s/he has undertaken
his/her scholarly utmost to research the historical facts of the story we
are about to read: ‘Many of the presented facts – names, places, events . . .
that I have been able to check are verifiable; others appear dubious at
best or have been deliberately falsified, distorted, or simply invented.
Real people move briefly in and out of the narrative, others remain
unidentified – or unidentifiable – or are perhaps pseudonymous.’21 The
reference to the fabricated aspects of the story lends a degree of authen-
ticity to the remainder. This is a familiar trope of Victorian adventure
fiction, much of which begins with an ‘editor’ verifying parts of the
story. In Rider Haggard’s She (1887), for example, the editor offers his
uncertainty about the possible veracity of the narrator, the Cambridge
mathematician Robert Horace Holly’s account, as evidence of his own
credibility: ‘Of the history itself the reader must judge. . . . Personally
I have made up my mind to refrain from comments. . . . To me the story
seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face. Its explanation I must
leave to others.’22
The strategy of revealing while concealing the clues is brought to
perfection in The Prestige. The very first camera shot offers an oblique
illustration of Angier’s trick; but it is only at the end that we can make
sense of what was disclosed to us at the beginning. The film opens on
a vista of black top hats scattered on the ground in an outside space
(Tesla’s laboratory grounds, we learn later). If we take the hat as a
metonymy for the magician, this would hint at the magic trick being
premised on the multiplicity, or at least duality, of magicians involved

in any one performance (a duality recreated not only in the doubling

of characters23 but also in the joint screenplay composition of the
film director brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan,24 and further
reflected in the close proximity of the release dates of The Prestige and
Burger’s ‘sibling’ film about nineteenth-century magic).25 In the clos-

ing scenes of The Prestige we discover that Borden’s ‘Transported Man’
relied on twin brotherhood. There are two Bordens, and not even
the women in their lives knew about their double identity (indeed,
in Priest’s novel, their sense of self/selves is fundamentally linked to
their unity, ‘Alfred’ being the composite name for the twins ‘Al’bert
and ‘Fred’erick; when one of them dies, the other admits to ‘no longer
know[ing] myself’).26 One of the brothers is hanged for murder, the
other survives to kill Angier, whose own double had revealed himself
to the Borden awaiting execution. Angier, too, has always had a dual
identity: ‘The Great Danton’ in public life, he is Lord Colderdale in
his private capacity. The secret of his survival resides in his apparatus,
which is not, as his Victorian (and contemporary) audience might
suspect, a tele-transportation device but a duplication machine. Just
like the top hats we see yet whose meaning we do not take in at the
beginning, Angier has been creating a copy of himself every time he
performed his trick. The copy would continue the act by staging a
glamorous return, while the original would fall through the trap door
into the water tank and drown. When Angier set Borden up for his
‘murder’, he did not allow for Borden’s own duality. After Borden’s
execution his brother exacts revenge by shooting Angier and setting
fire to his theatre. In his dying moments Angier reveals his secret:
[Angier] It took courage to climb into that machine every night

not knowing if I’d be the man in the box or in the prestige. Do
you want to see what it cost me? You didn’t see where you are, did
you – look . . . [directing his eyes at a long row of water tanks, now
all enveloped by flames.]
[Borden] I don’t care. You went half-way round the world, you
spent a fortune. You did terrible things, really terrible things, Robert,
and all for nothing, nothing.
[Angier, talking haltingly, in pain.] You never understood why we
did this. The audience knows the truth. The world is miserable, solid
all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second,
if you could make them wonder, then you got to see something very
special. You really don’t know. It was . . . It was the look on their
faces. [Falls back, dying.]

[Cutter, performing his trick to Borden’s daughter.] Every magic

trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called the pledge.
The magician shows you something ordinary. The second act is called
the turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it
into something extraordinary. But you wouldn’t clap yet, because

making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back.
[The surviving Borden enters to catch the ball his daughter is bounc-
ing and take her home. – Flashback to earlier scene: after Angier’s
death Borden is shown walking along the burning glass tanks.] Now
you’re looking for the secret. [Flashback to opening shot of the film:
vista of the top hats.] But you won’t find it because of course you’re
not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to
be fooled. (1:56:17–1:59:50)
We want to be fooled because the ‘truth’ may be more than we have

bargained for. In the concluding shot the camera moves over a multi-
tude of glass cabinets before zooming in on one, which contains the – or
rather a – dead body of Angier. The one transparent glass case stands for
all the others, all holding the human remains of Angier’s performances.
Every performance produced another replica that had to be disposed of.
Each tank is a coffin, the basement of Angier’s theatre a graveyard
of suicides. The original Robert Angier died at the rehearsal of his new
act prior to its first public performance. The first glass cabinet houses
the ‘original’, all others the copies. The glass case with the copy inside
is an apt metaphor for film, for it too deals in ‘dead’ images. It is also a
metaphor for neo-Victorian fiction and film, which play with our desire
to rediscover and possess the ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ by offering us a
hall of mirrors full of copy. As in Baudrillard’s third-order simulation,
the copy becomes the real thing: in Angier’s performance as much as in
neo-Victorianism.
5.2 The conjuror in the closet: Sarah Waters’s

Affinity (1999)
In Affinity it is the performance not of magic but of spiritualism in which

the third-order simulation is embedded and through which it is decon-
structed. Spiritualism and stage magic are of course closely aligned; they
perform the same tricks in different environments: the private home
for spiritualist sittings, the public domain of a theatre for displays of
magic. Priest’s Rupert Angier initiates his magician’s career as a spiritu-
alist preying on the vulnerability of the newly bereaved; in ‘Eisenheim

the Illusionist’ and Burger’s adaptation the hero’s stage invocation of

spectral apparitions blurs the boundaries between the performance of
magic and the spiritualist séance. It was precisely because they knew all
the tricks that masters of magic like Harry Houdini, unlike his filmic
counterpart in Gillian Armstrong’s Death Defying Acts (2007), were able

to debunk spiritualists as charlatans and failed magicians.27 In Waters a
character’s reference to spiritualists as ‘a lot of clever conjurors’28 is con-
firmed early on by the spiritualist medium herself, when she explains
one of her illusions to the woman already well on her way to becoming
ensnared by her sleight of hand: after conjuring up the word ‘Truth’
on the flesh of her arm, she illustrates how she achieved the effect by
marking out the letters with a knitting needle and then sprinkling salt
on the wound, thus making the letters stand out in crimson (168). The
‘truth’ of the spiritualist performance is, indeed, fakery.
Spiritualism in Affinity acts as a simulation which operates a treble
deception: on the characters tricked by the lesbian couple, by masking,
and thereby enabling, homosexual acts; on the protagonist, by fur-
nishing her with an exonerating language for the exploration of her
transgressive desires, and, through the concept of spiritual-qua-erotic
‘affinity’, securing her complicity in the prison escape plot; and on
the contemporary reader, who will see through the spiritualist mas-
querade and yet is likely to be seduced into suspending disbelief in
the desire for a happy supernatural ending to the lesbian love story.
In her hide-and-seek game with the visible lesbian ‘spirit’ and the
crucially ‘invisible’ part of her identity Waters draws on and extends
Terry Castle’s concept of ‘the apparitional lesbian’ by adding class as a
further determinant. Castle examines the way in which the figure of the
woman-loving woman has haunted Western literature and film, arguing
that the female ghost – so full of allure in her elusiveness and always
denied at the point of materialisation – has served as a metaphor for
the spectre of female same-sex desire. This ‘recognition through nega-
tion’, Castle concludes, has ‘functioned as the necessary psychological
and rhetorical means for objectifying – and ultimately embracing – that
which otherwise could not be acknowledged’.29 Affinity plays with the
reader’s recognition of the conflation between spiritualism and lesbian-
ism, illustrating the ease with which the former can be deployed as a
screen for the latter by giving us some insight into what happens during
the medium’s private séances with nervously depressed young women,
who as a result of her special ‘treatment’ recover from their hysteria and
develop a new spiritual, speak sensual, awareness, but who, unsurpris-
ingly, cannot be produced at court as witnesses for the defence. And

yet we fail to see the one truly ‘apparitional’ lesbian of the story who
stage-manages all the events.
If The Prestige hints at the necrophilic undercurrents in our imaginary
revisitations of the Victorian, Affinity tenders a less sinister image of the
neo-Victorian textual and sexual body. It tells the story of the Victorian

hysteric-as-repressed-lesbian, Margaret Prior, through journal entries
which map her growing obsession with the spiritualist Selina Dawes,
incarcerated in Millbank Penitentiary for having caused her benefac-
tress Mrs Brink’s death after assaulting a teenage girl during a private
séance. Selina’s diary extracts, set two years earlier, are offered as a com-
plementary account contextualizing her prison sentence and, as the
novel progresses, increasingly serve as a counter-narrative to Margaret’s
version and vision. Here, too, the text is framed by a corpse: the ‘still &
straight’ (4), lifeless body of Mrs Brink, who suffered a heart attack as a
result of the shock of disillusionment, anticipates Margaret’s projected
suicide at the close of the novel. The corpse is emblematic not, as in
The Prestige, of the neo-Victorian venture of resurrecting the past, but of
the destruction wreaked by illicit desire on the Victorian spinster. The
spectacular petrification of defrauded desire at the moment of enlight-
enment has its counterpoint in the consummation of desire, behind
the scenes, by the trickster couple Selina and her maid Ruth. As in stage
magic, which Affinity mimics in its enactment of pledge/misdirection,
turn/disappearance, and prestige/shock revelation, the iconographic
display of and fetishistic gaze directed at Selina’s body (its calculated
impassivity acting as an invitation for the inscription of erotic fanta-
sies)30 serves to distract the reader’s attention and provides a screen for
the shadow game operated by Ruth. The instability of the figure of the
‘magician’ constitutes a conjuring trick in itself, for the ostensible mis-
tress of illusions, the spiritualist, turns out to be the assistant merely:
not the strategist who pulls the strings but, rather, as the line from
Selina’s diary which concludes the novel indicates, one of her puppets:
‘“Remember,” Ruth is saying, “whose girl you are”’ (352).
The ‘real’ conjuror, Ruth, comes doubly disguised, as Selina’s male
spirit guide and cross-class ‘master’, Peter Quick (anachronistically
purloined from Henry James’s Peter Quint, whose unruly tempera-
ment Quick anticipates),31 and as the lowly servant Vigers employed
by Margaret’s mother; the tweeny not afraid of ghosts because she
impersonates them. In Selina’s opening journal entry Quick is shown
to be the central agent of the plot: it is he who frightened and then
manhandled the hysterical Madeleine Silvester; his ‘white legs’ (and
gender), exposed by his ‘open gown’ (2), that caused Mrs Brink’s

collapse; and his desires and deeds which led to Selina’s conviction.
As in the introductory pledge of a magic trick, the text offers us all the
clues to the mystery, but it is only with hindsight that we recognize
and understand them: when Quick leaves the scene, Ruth enters it; her
intimidating attention to Mrs Brink (‘holding tight’ to her ‘hand . . .

saying she would not let it go’ during the doctor’s examination)
ensures her silence: ‘Mrs Brink looked then as if she longed to speak
but could not’ (3). The love affair between Ruth and Selina is hinted
at between the lines of Ruth’s refusal to ‘lock up my own mistress,
who has done nothing’ (1). Later it is Margaret’s lawyer brother
Stephen who muses about the ‘beau in muslin’ for whose sake Dawes
must have gone to prison, while Vigers, the very lover in question, is
offering biscuits to the guests (101).
This scene is emblematic, for Ruth’s (the conjuror’s) silent presence
is key to the ‘disappearance trick’ which follows the textual ‘pledge’
(Selina’s first diary entry, which exhibits the prime movers while obscur-
ing the precise nature of their interaction). In her quest for Selina’s story
Margaret repeatedly comes across representations of Peter Quick, and
records the sense of odd familiarity she experiences when looking at
the dark eyes and muscular arm of this supposed spirit reproduced on
paper or in sculptural form, but never once does she (neither do we)
recognize her own maid who daily helps her in and out of clothing,
prepares her baths, and otherwise uses her free access to her mistress’s
room to drive the trickster plot forward. Because the first-person per-
spective encourages our identification with the central character, we are
seduced into sharing Margaret’s misperception of events, even though
the textual insertions of Selina’s journal narrative allow us privileged
insight into Ruth’s and Quick’s interconnecting manipulations. Ruth’s
sudden appearance in her bedroom when Selina first takes up residence
in Mrs Brink’s house is associated with the spectral identity she will soon
co-opt for her spirit persona: ‘she had come quietly . . . like a real lady’s
maid, like a ghost’ (119). Expected to be ‘omniscient, ubiquitous and
invisible’, Victorian house servants were, as Tatiana Kontou points out,
indeed constructed as a species of ghosts.32 In Thomas Hardy’s The Hand
of Ethelberta (1876) the servants entertain themselves dancing, with ‘the
noiselessness of ghosts’, in the sitting-room while their masters are dining
below.33 The slippage between servant and spectre is also explored in the
Victorian ghost story; thus when Henry James’s governess-narrator in
The Turn of the Screw senses that there was ‘something undefinably astir
in the house’34 in the early hours of the morning, she refers to both the
living, and the undead, servants at Bly.

That ghosts might take the earthly shape of maids is insinuated in

Selina’s warning words to Margaret: ‘They [spirits] . . . see everything.
Even the pages of your secret book’ (111). The birth of Peter Quick,
the removal of the medium’s cabinet to the alcove that has a door in
it (thus enabling Ruth’s entries and exits), the establishment of séances

with Mrs Brink’s friends, the introduction of private sessions with
pretty women Peter fancies – none of these ideas originate from but are
‘visited’ on Selina. Ruth’s increasing mastery of Selina, as recorded in
her diary, is accompanied by Quick’s sado-masochistic interventions.
The rope that cuts into Selina’s flesh during sittings, the collar that
marks him out as her owner, the mantra of obedience he impresses on
her (‘your prayer must always be May I be used . . . my medium must
do as she is bid’ [261]): all reverse social hierarchies of class as much
as they transgress gender codes. Ruth’s management of Mrs Brink and
implicitly threatening behaviour when Selina is installed in the house
(all previous mediums, Ruth tells Selina, turned out to be ‘crooks’ and
had to be dismissed; Ruth’s warning is not missed by Selina [155])
suggest that Ruth master-minded past encounters with mediums for
her own libidinal purposes, and that Selina’s satisfactory perform-
ance may be judged in terms of her compliance with Ruth’s desires. In
contradistinction to Margaret, the reader is thus able to gain insider
knowledge of Ruth’s control of Selina, and yet is no closer than Margaret
to making a connection between Ruth/Peter Quick and Vigers, the
servant Margaret can so frequently ‘hear . . . stir[ing] above’ her at
night (116).
It is only after the final magic turn, Selina’s disappearance from
Millbank (an escape brought about not with the help of spirit hands
but with the connivance of a friendly warden duped with messages
from the beyond), and with the emergence of the ‘magician’ figure
into full view, that the reader is at last able to ‘see’ and identify Ruth
as Vigers, Margaret’s maid, currently on her way to Italy with Selina
in order to start a new life with Margaret’s name and inheritance:
‘Now . . . I began to glimpse the whole, thick, monstrous shape of
it’ (337). The crucial insight here is Margaret’s, and our own, class
blindness: ‘What was she, to me? I could not even recall the details
of her face, her look, her manners. I could not say, cannot say now,
what shade her hair is, what colour her eye, how her lip curves’
(340). The ‘monstrous’ consequences of acquiescing with the idea
that those deemed socially ‘inferior’ are irrelevant and therefore
rightly remain invisible to us strike home with a vengeance. At the
start of her diary Margaret had set out to write history from a new

angle, a perspective programmatically different from the one her

historian father would have taken: ‘no, of course he would not start
the story there, with a lady and her servant, and petticoats and loose
hair’ (7).35 By not ‘bother[ing] with the detail of the skirts’ (8), her
father – the male historian and story-teller – would have missed out

on a vital insight into the personally intimidating and disciplining
nature of the penitentiary’s architecture. Margaret gains her first view
of Millbank when, on entering the prison grounds, she bends down to
disentangle her gown from jutting stones: ‘it is in lifting my eyes from
my sweeping hem that I first see the pentagons of Millbank – and
the nearness of them, and the suddenness of that gaze, makes them
seem terrible. I look at them, and feel my heart beat hard, and I am
afraid’ (8). This experience predisposes her to empathize with the
inmates and their predicament rather than to assume the position of
‘upright’ superiority expected and advised by Mr Shillitoe and Miss
Ridley. However, as she realizes at the end of her journey, this woman-
centred and supposedly bottom-up perspective still excluded the key
agent, the servant, thus causing her own demise.
Ironically, while from her first visit to Millbank Margaret is aware of
and sensitive to the panoptical gaze – a gaze which she realizes is also,
increasingly, turned on her, both at home and in the prison36 – she never
considers the potential dangers of the maid’s gaze. Despite a childhood
incident, when a servant responded to her stare with a painful pinch
(340), and in the face of the Millbank prisoners’ intent observation of
her and warnings about their cunning manoeuvres,37 it is only after her
maid has made away with her lover, her money, and her identity that
she comes to recognize the controlling, blinding power of the subaltern’s
gaze: ‘Every time I stood in Selina’s cell, feeling my flesh yearn towards
hers, there might as well have been Vigers at the gate, looking on, steal-
ing Selina’s gaze from me to her’ (341–2). In a variation of the triangular
love plot of James’s The Bostonians (1886)38 Waters adds a twist on the
gendered class dynamics of the contest: as in James a ‘masculine’ intruder
intervenes in the ‘romantic friendship’39 between a repressed lesbian
middle-class hysteric and her feminine-spiritualist object of desire; the
difference is that Waters’s triumphant lover is a lesbian servant.
The all-embracing illusion to which Margaret has fallen victim has
the effect of turning not only her life, but even her death into a simu-
lacrum. Thus her farewell letter to her one-time lover and sister-in-law
Helen, posted with the thought of her imminent, scandalous, life
in Italy with Selina, now assumes the appearance of a suicide note:
‘I wish you will only regret my going from you, not cry out against the

manner of it. I wish you will remember me with kindness, not with
pain. Your pain will not help me, where I am going. But your kindness
will help my mother, and my brother, as it helped them once before
[when she attempted suicide]. . . . I cannot live, and not be at her side!’
(316). Just as the ‘interrogation posed by simulation’, in Baudrillard’s

terms, precipates ‘the knowledge that truth, reference, objective cause
have ceased to exist’,40 so Margaret’s comprehension of the momen-
tous imposture enacted on her retrospectively dispossesses all of her
thoughts and actions, her sense of identity, her prospective suicide
even, of authenticity and ‘truth’.
5.3 Simulation and consciousness: Mind travel in

Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006)
The instability and insubstantiality of all truth claims in the face of the
omnipresence of the simulacrum is explicitly grounded in Baudrillardian
philosophy in The End of Mr Y. Epigraphed by a quotation from
Simulacra and Simulation, the text prefaces itself as ‘a gigantic simu-
lacrum . . . that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for
itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference’.41
This is implied by the self-referential title adopted from the (fictive)
fin-de-siècle novel about a self-reflective alternative world which by the
nature of the simulation it projects induces the ‘real-life’ death of author
and reader alike. The ‘end’ of ‘Mr Y’ is a mind game with proliferating
significations: at its most concrete level, that of the fiction within the
fiction, it is about the ‘end’ (death) of the character Mr Y, the protago-
nist of Thomas E. Lumas’s novel, and about the nature of his ‘end’; for
the heroine of Thomas’s novel (note the authorial names game) it is
also about the demise of the author, Lumas, and all of his readers, and
thus paradoxically about the cultural ‘undeath’ of this particular author,
who continues to attract attention precisely because of the mythology
of a deadly curse; on a further level it is about putting an end to Mr Y:
the book, the person, and the questions both raise about consciousness
and ‘reality’. In Affinity Margaret’s self-deception and dream of happi-
ness with Selina are of Baudrillard’s first order of simulation: simulation
‘founded on . . . imitation and counterfeit’ with the aim of instituting
a utopian order, in which ‘a radically different universe takes form’: a
‘romantic dream’ that ‘stands opposed to the continent of the real’,42
the ‘real’ here denoting normative, heterosexist society. By contrast, in
The End of Mr Y the protagonist’s self-image and perception of the world
are already consciously invested in third-order simulation, where, as

Baudrillard argues, the ‘models no longer constitute . . . the imaginary

in relation to the real, they are themselves an anticipation of the real,
and thus leave no room for any sort of fictional anticipation – they are
immanent, and thus leave no room for any kind of imaginary tran-
scendence.’43 This transcendence is unattainable in a simulation which

always feeds and returns on itself: the dream world of the personal and
collective unconscious to which the characters accede in both Lumas’s
and Thomas’s novels.
Thomas’s twenty-first-century anti-heroine Ariel Manto, her nominal
identity already a construct (her first name a maternal fantasy of
apocalypse derived from Plath’s poetry, her surname a self-reinvention),
withdraws to the life of the mind and poststructuralist theory in her
endeavour to find relief from a difficult childhood that has left her
permanently alienated from her body (which she continues to self-
harm with abusive sexual encounters): ‘Real life is physical. Give me
books instead: give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the
thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book; I’d give
anything for that’ (134). Fascinated by thought experiments which
establish a conceptual bridge between poststructuralist theory and
quantum physics, she starts out on a doctorate under the supervision
of Saul Burlem after hearing his lecture on the Victorian writer Lumas.
Mysteriously Burlem, who is planning to write a biography of Lumas,
disappears shortly after Ariel takes up her studies. On her way back from
the university, closed after the partial collapse of the science building,
she stops by an antiquarian bookshop, in which she stumbles across
The End of Mr Y: the novel of which there exists only one known copy
in a German bank vault. Her feverish purchase and consumption of the
book is matched by its contents. It relates the story of the late-Victorian
‘Mr Y’ who, baffled by a fairground illusion (the materialization of
ghostly apparitions on stage), seeks out the conjuror in order to gain
insight into how the trick works and, after being given a magic potion
enabling him to mind-travel into people’s consciousness, becomes
obsessed with the ‘Troposphere’ (adapted from ‘tropos’, character, and
‘atmosphere’ [68–9]): so much so that he sacrifices everything for it,
his marriage, profession, material existence, ultimately even his life. As
Ariel discovers when she travels to the Troposphere herself, this alter-
native universe has a quality so irresistible and addictive that it proves
indeed life-threatening.
The fictional Lumas is adapted from the Victorian writer Edwin A.
Abbott (1838–1926), whose mathematical novel Flatland (1884), an
early science-fiction text much-admired by Ariel, experiments with

the impact of one and two-dimensional worlds on the development of

consciousness, personal identity, and social interaction. The protagonist
of the two-dimensional Flatland travels to the one-dimensional Lineland
and the three-dimensional Spaceland and imagines what life might be
like in no-dimensional Pointland; when on his return to Flatland he

attempts to alert his compatriots to three-dimensional thought he is
imprisoned for sedition.44 Lumas also carries echoes of the Victorian
mathematician, physicist, and poet James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79),
briefly mentioned in the novel (96), whose ‘Lines written under the
conviction that it is not wise to read Mathematics after one’s fire is out’
(1853), ‘A Poem in Dynamics’ (1854), and ‘Recollections of Dreamland’
(1856) explore the existence of parallel worlds: the mathematical school
of ‘Learned fools’ drilled into ‘formal rules’ (‘Lines’) is juxtaposed to the
world of dreams, into whose ‘boundless space’ the speaker travels and
whose fourth dimension, Time freed from linear progression, enables
him to ‘link the past and present into one continuous life’ (‘Dreamland’).
‘A Poem in Dynamics’ parodically brings these worlds together through
an ‘infinitesimal link’ and an ‘Equation of Continuity’; a similar equation
and diagram feature in The End of Mr Y (266).45
The most important model for Lumas is Samuel Butler (1835–1902),
whose satirical utopia Erewhon (1872) and philosophical reflections in
his Note-Books on the nature of reality and consciousness are repeatedly
discussed in the novel. Like Butler, Lumas had a stormy relationship
with Darwin over their divergent approaches to evolution. The key role
Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia is accorded in Butler’s study on Evolution,
Old and New (1879)46 is satirized in the novel through Burlem’s choice
of a hiding place for the most dangerous page of The End of Mr Y (the
page containing the recipe for the tincture which enables entry to the
Troposphere). Lumas’s claim that the world only exists in and through
thought is drawn from Butler’s Note-Books, as quoted (in adaptation of
Hamlet) in the epigraph to Part One: ‘Not only is nothing good or ill but
thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all, except in so far as thinking
has made it so’ (1).47 Butler’s concept of ‘unconscious memory’ (memory
inherited phylogenetically in the course of the evolution of a species),
his ascription of life and sentience to ‘every atom in the universe’,48 in
particular his reflections on the way in which evolution might affect
machines in generating consciousness and what impact this might have
on human–machine relations are of direct relevance to the novel.
Ariel recognizes the analogies with Butler’s thought and is further
entranced by Lumas’s novel because its preface formulates ideas which
anticipate twentieth-century poststructuralist theory – Derridaean

différance and polysemy, the Lacanian imaginary and symbolic,

Baudrillard and simulation:
THE DISCOURSE WHICH FOLLOWS may appear to the reader

as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered

moments when one is still mesmerized by those conjuring tricks that
are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed. Those readers
should not abandon their scepticism, for it is their will to seek to peer
behind the Conjuror’s curtain, as it is the will of man to ask those
peculiar whats, and wheres and hows of life. Of life, as of dreams.
Of image, as of word. As thought, as of speech.
When one looks at the illusions of the world, one sees only the
world. For where does illusion end? Indeed, what is there in life that
is not a conjuring trick? . . . As Robert-Houdin has built automata
with which to produce his illusions, I shall here propose to create
an automaton of mind, through which one may see illusions and
realities beyond; from which one, if he knows how, may spring into
the automata of all minds and their electricity . . . (29–30, emphasis
in original)
In this novel too parallels are drawn between the illusions produced
by a magic trick and the poststructuralist concept of the simulacrum.
Both are associated with the world of dreams and the unconscious, in
which we appear to accede to insights which our ‘waking’ mind strives
to analyse and organize logocentrically, through language. In an echo
of Derrida’s ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’49 there is nothing beyond the
symbolic. All the world’s an illusion of enunciation. However, just like
a conjuror plays with the audience, so the author backtracks repeatedly,
most prominently at the end of the preface, when his disclaimer – ‘it is
only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered’ (31) – hints at the
opposite, intimating the truthfulness of the fiction, the ‘reality’ behind
the illusion. Similarly, the preface proposes both that there is an external
creator – the ‘conjuror’ who invented the mind-reading machine – and
that the world is entirely of our own making, a reflection solely of our
unconscious, of dreams, memories and fantasies: ‘Perhaps I mislead the
reader by talking of the Conjuror. Let the creator become curator! And
we creatures who live on in the dreams of a world made of our own
thought . . . where the fibres of being are conjured from memories no
more real or unreal than the dream in which we may observe them’ (30).
Here the stage magician summoning up an illusion, who represents the
idea of a transcendent force, is conjured away.

The creator become curator is a reference to William Paley’s early

nineteenth-century metaphor of the ‘watchmaker’, which sustained the
Enlightenment idea of the universe as a ‘divinely inspired machine’
operating on the cause and effect principles of Newtonian physics.50 The
concept of an ‘artificer’51 or ‘Great Architect’52 came under heavy attack

from evolutionists, Darwin as well as Butler, the latter of whom devoted
an entire chapter of his book on Evolution, Old and New to disproving
Paley in order to affirm the teleology of all organic matter as the fore-
most principle of evolution. While countenancing the idea of a design
to the world, Butler drew on Buffon and Erasmus Darwin to argue that
‘the design which has designed organisms, has resided within, and been
embodied in, the organisms themselves’: the world was the work not of
a deity but of organic life itself.53 Lumas’s preface thus engages the reader
in a Victorian philosophical-theological-scientific debate about the prov-
enance of the ‘design’, the human mind, and its essence, consciousness.
The question of the design/er is later applied to the Troposphere which,
Ariel is told, is a human creation (223). In Lumas’s preface there is, and
yet is not, a designer; the world is free to develop within the constraints
of its construction, the origins of which are unknowable. The paradox
posited in the conjunction of an external (conjuring/transcendent) and
an exclusively internal (dreaming/imagining) consciousness, of maker,
machine, and mind, of illusion and ‘reality’ remains unresolved. The
preface concludes by reiterating, in aporistic terms, the supremacy of
the dream world: ‘beyond this is not truth but what we have made
truth; yet this is a truth we cannot see’ (30). Ultimately it is only
through ‘the logos of metaphora’ that we can ‘find the protasis of the
past, that glorious illusion which we call memory’ (30): our sense of a
past, so essential for our self-consciousness, is founded on images drawn
from our imagination.
Lumas’s conceptualization of the world as illusion and our entrapment
within our mental universe are illustrated in two of his short stories
whose meaning Ariel ponders before she discovers The End of Mr Y. In
‘The Daguerrotype’ an exact replica of the protagonist’s house mysteri-
ously materializes in close proximity to his home, its only difference
being its absolute inaccessibility. An old man explains that the house
might constitute a three-dimensional copy made in a four-dimensional
world; just as it is impossible to ‘enter’ a two-dimensional daguerreotype
of a three-dimensional ‘original’, so the equivalent might be true in this
case. When the protagonist goes to see the old man, what he finds is
his three-dimensional card-board copy. In the light of Lumas’s preface
the implication is that if the old man is the counterpart to the conjuror,

the protagonist’s (and by inference the reader’s) world constitutes a

mere simulacrum; a simulacrum, however, within which individual
consciousness has developed. That this consciousness is forever trapped
within its confines is suggested by a second story, ‘The Blue Room’, in
which two philosophers seek to leave the titular room, but all exit routes

invariably return them to their point of departure. Their philosophy
is powerless to offer a resolution to the experiential and psychological
muddle: the phenomenologist argues that ‘as there are no such things as
ghosts, they have nothing to fear’, while the existentialist concludes that
‘he has never seen a ghost, and therefore . . . they don’t exist’ (16–17).
The Freudian concept of the uncanny54 might offer an explanation for
‘The Blue Room’ as a metaphor for the unconscious processes of the
mind. Coming as it does at the start of the text and thus as a prologue to
Lumas’s novel, the story also furnishes an explicatory model for Mr Y’s
Troposphere which, as Ariel discovers, is ‘made by thinking’ (265), rep-
resenting both individual and collective thought and memories, and
which can thus be conceptualized, as Lumas’s preface already indicates,
‘as a text . . . a world of metaphor’ (267).
One of the reasons for Ariel’s fascination with The End of Mr Y is its
engagement with the very ideas with which she approaches literary
texts and life. The psychoanalytic, linguistic, and poststructuralist
theories the novel illustrates in its representation of the unconscious
and the world of dreams are complemented by the concepts of quan-
tum physics when Ariel begins to discuss alternative models of the
universe with the evolutionary biologist Heather and the theologian
Adam. In contradistinction to the deterministic model of Newtonian
physics (whose defunctness is signalled by the collapse of the Newton
Building), quantum physics, as Ariel explains, offers a wealth of prob-
abilities. Subatomic particles are thought to deviate from binary norms
(‘here/there’, ‘day/night’) by being everywhere at once, violating linear
Newtonian principles of cause and effect (past, present, future). Two
different interpretations within quantum physics assign these parti-
cles a fixed place either through the presence of an observer or across
a multiverse: ‘while the Copenhagen interpretation suggests that all
probabilities collapse into one definite reality on observation, the
many-worlds interpretation suggests that all the possibilities exist at
once, but that each one has its own universe to go with it’ (158). The
reader’s implicit presence offers an illustration of the Copenhagen
model when applied to the fictional universe(s) of the novel (our gaze
fixates Ariel as being in one place at a time: either the Troposphere or
the ‘real’ world), while the concept of multiple worlds is exemplified

by Ariel’s journeys to the Troposphere: not only does she – and some
of the people she meets there – exist in two places at once (mentally
in the Troposphere, physically in the ‘real’ world), but she is also able
to travel across multiple minds and memories as well as through time.
Her use of the tropospheric ‘underground’ system of time travel, by

means of which she is able to return to an earlier moment in ‘real’
time, thus revoking an action she would have committed shortly
afterwards, by selecting the train most representative of that moment’s
emotion, generates two different versions of her ‘real-life’ experience.
Her intervention, at the end of the novel, in two historical events cre-
ates a diversity of new worlds when, through mind control, she stops
the turn-of-the-century American amateur scientist Abbie Lathrop
(based on a real-life figure)55 from breeding the first generation of
laboratory mice and persuades Lumas to burn the manuscript of his
novel, thus ending the ‘curse’ of Mr Y.
If Lumas’s preface to his novel sets up a self-contradictory pledge
which metafictionally recreates the ‘both/and’ alternatives of quantum
physics’ multiple worlds, then the Troposphere functions as the text’s
central conjuring trick. It too has inexhaustible possibilities: believed to
be the site of the personal and the collective unconscious, of individual
dreams and cultural myths, reflecting Classical mythology, literature,
Hollywood film, virtual reality and second life games, the ‘Tropo’sphere
is the world of illimitable tropes (98). To every traveller the Troposphere,
or MindSpace, looks different. When Ariel first encounters the Project
Starlight men, who are intent on killing everybody who knows the
secret, and tries to block their approach, they cannot see the obstacles
she places in their way. Only the quasi-supernatural characters (the
KIDS, Apollo Smintheus, and Adam, who died while travelling in her
mind) share Ariel’s mental vision. In the course of her trips she comes
to recognize the metaphorical nature of the Troposphere: its derelict
urban landscape, seen always at night at whatever time in the day
she visits, reflects her punitive sense of self. But the Troposphere also
taps into cultural fantasies and myths: the Project Starlight gangsters
seem to have sprung straight from Hollywood action movies, while
their uncanny child guides, the KIDS, are demonic versions of Tweedle
Dee and Tweedle Dum; Ariel’s postmodern deity, the decidedly camp
Apollo Smintheus, god of mice, derives from Greek mythology and
Homer’s Iliad.56 While the gangsters exert considerable influence over
the ‘real’ world and indeed caused the flight of Ariel’s supervisor, the
mouse god and the dead/ly children have the appearance of purely
imaginary characters: of simulacra. In adaptation of Baudrillard’s point

about Disneyland serving to conceal the hyperreality of the world

which created it, the Troposphere has the effect of both hiding and
intimating the artefactual nature of Ariel’s ‘reality’. As a metaphor for
the unconscious it enhances the extra-tropospheric world’s appearance
of authenticity: everything is possible in the Troposphere, and nobody

can get really harmed (a bomb has no effect on the KIDS), but in the
‘real’ world Adam is beaten up, Ariel is sexually abused, and Burlem has
to run for his life.
Yet the idea that Adam’s and Ariel’s death in the ‘real’ world is com-
plemented by eternal life in the Troposphere casts the nature of this
‘reality’ in doubt. Indeed, repeated references, throughout the novel,
to the counterfeit appearance of the ‘real’ world hint at its condition
as a simulacrum. Early into the story, on her way to university, Ariel
muses that ‘The whole place has the kind of stillness you’d expect just
before the world ended’ (83), noting that ‘The sky is . . . a hyperreal
blue’ (121); later she reflects that ‘For the second time this week, I feel
as though I’m living in a black-and-white photocopy’ (289). As Ariel’s
visits increase, the Troposphere begins to assume a greater appearance
of reality (clouds start to appear on the night sky, she feels raindrops
and sees trees and a garden), whereas the ostensibly ‘real’ world turns
more artificial. This is particularly notable after Ariel has tracked down
Burslem, who is in hiding with Lura, the German physicist who owned
the only extant copy of Lumas’s book before it found its way to Ariel. As
she is approaching insight into the hyperreality of the ‘real’ world, Ariel
becomes aware of the rain ‘pounding’ down ‘like an industrial machine’
(385), the sky being ‘drum-metal grey’ (385) and then ‘as blue and sharp
as a reflection in metal . . . it’s more like something from a book than
from real life’ (386).
In fact, not only are neither of her worlds ‘real’, the question arises
whether Ariel is actually (still) alive. When she expresses her fear
that the Starlight men might kill her, ‘Apollo Smintheus looks away
from me for a second, as if he’s wondering whether or not to tell me
something’ (224). Later he impresses on her that ‘Nothing leaves the
Troposphere’ (267), and that ‘Being in the Troposphere . . . [means] [i]f
you’re here, you’re already dead’ (334), urging her to ‘give this some
more thought’ (338). Are we to conclude that to enter the Troposphere
means to die, or conversely, that it is only the dead who have access to
it; that it is a kind of repository for the spirit when the body has ceased
to exist (this appears to be the case with the KIDS and later Adam)? Or
perhaps Ariel died at the start of the novel, in the collapsing campus
building; indeed the event that immediately follows, her discovery

of the bookshop and Lumas’s novel, has the hyperreal quality of the
Troposphere. Perhaps the ultimate illusion operated by the novel,
one that is implied but left for the reader to explore further (Apollo
Smintheus’s instruction to ‘give this some more thought’ is addressed
to us as much as to Ariel), is that Ariel or any of the characters ever

was alive to begin with. If, as Apollo Smintheus reminds her, ‘The
thought is all thought. – The mind is all mind’ (265), the Troposphere
and also the extra-tropospheric world, everything that forms part of
Ariel’s experience, might be read as an elaborate simulation: one that,
as in Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999),57 is generated
electronically by a computer programme.
Early on in the novel, Ariel, Heather and Adam consider to what
extent machines might develop consciousness. This was an idea
explored by Lumas’s real-life model, Samuel Butler, in his 1863 riposte
to Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), ‘Darwin Among the Machines’, in
which he argued that machine evolution would eventually supersede
human evolution: ‘we are ourselves creating our own successors . . .
we are daily giving [machines] greater power and supplying . . . that
self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect
has been to the human race’, concluding that ‘In the course of ages we
shall find ourselves the inferior race’.58 This piece was later adapted for
Erewhon,59 which posits the machine as having gained ascendancy over
humanity: ‘Man’s very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-
made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the
work that machines have wrought upon him.’60 Ariel comments that
‘there’s no reason machines . . . can’t become conscious as long as they
inherit this consciousness from us’, wondering whether ‘we can merge
with machines and become cyborgs, and eventually the machine part
of us might become conscious’ (336). In her adaptation of Butler’s ideas
to twenty-first-century human-machine interaction, Thomas draws on
Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991), which claims a ‘mythic’
temporality for millennial modernity: ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and
fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs. . . .
The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material real-
ity’; ‘the boundary between science fiction and social reality’, Haraway
affirms, ‘is an optical illusion.’61 This optical illusion is taken to its stark
conclusion in Thomas’s novel when Lura speculates about the possibility
of conducting a thought experiment through a computer simulation:
‘Imagine a computer, with a vast hard drive memory. There’s a pro-

gramme running on the computer – maybe a little like a game, with

characters and locations. . . . Say they’re part of a simulation game . . .

a little town for them to live in, and then the software generates
effects like rain and droughts and wars? . . . What do you know about
artificial intelligence?’
‘I know that Samuel Butler was concerned that machines could

become conscious as easily as humans did’, I say. ‘That machine
consciousness is as inevitable as human consciousness. . . . He argued
that consciousness is just another part of evolution. It’s a random
mutation that could happen to anything. . . .’
. . . ‘Imagine that some mutation happens in our computer simula-
tion. The little characters become conscious. Now. What would their
thoughts be made of?’
. . . I imagine what it would be like to be one of these digital,
binary characters. How many dimensions would you be aware of?
How would you interact with other characters? I think about what
this world is made of – basically zeroes and ones – and then I realise
that in this little world everything would be zeroes and ones. . . . I’m
already beginning to feel sick. (390–1)
Ariel’s considerable discomfort signals her dawning recognition of what

might be her ‘true’ condition. In order to enter the Troposphere, she
had to traverse a tunnel, as described by Lumas’s hero, but in addition
to the flickering images of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Roman and Arabic
numerals and letters – the realm of language, the symbolic, thought –
Ariel saw binary code, zeroes and ones (177–8). When Ariel confronts
her about the possibility that they are ‘living in a computer simulation’,
Lura prevaricates – ‘The computer is a metaphor’ (392) – but suggests
that Ariel’s ability to influence thoughts on her mind-reading ventures
might indicate her capacity to think in machine rather than simply
in software code (395): which is the reason for her double mission, on
behalf of Lura and Apollo Smintheus, to modify the past by making
Lumas and Lathrop change their minds.
However chilling Thomas’s magic ‘turn’ may be with the reader’s
gradual realization of the nature of the simulation on display, the sen-
timental dénouement comes as a distinct anti-climax. The conclusion
to the conjuror’s tripartite act presents us not with the ‘prestige’, the
revelation of the trick, but with a cliché: after fulfilling their passion
for each other, Ariel and Adam, the new-born Adam and Eve, move
beyond the edge of consciousness into an Edenic garden possessed of a
tree. In her Acknowledgements Thomas admits to the difficulties posed
by this ending, intended to show that ‘Ariel and Adam never escape

language and metaphor: they don’t find anything absolute at the edge
of consciousness, just religious imagery’ (n.p.). In the Baudrillardian
reading the novel invites, the ‘simulacrum of divinity’ represented by
iconic representations such as the Garden of Eden (and perhaps also
Apollo Smintheus, a parodic version of the divine) might then serve

the purpose of ‘effacing God’ by bringing home to us the ‘truth . . . that
deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed,
even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum’;
for ‘if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to
the signs that constitute faith . . . [t]hen the whole system becomes
weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum’ –
indeed, this point (and quotation) is impressed on the reader on the
opening page, in the first epigraph.62 The question remains whether a
cliché can pull off the trick, especially since the idea of a transcendent
power strangely resistant to the computer simulation – the very oppo-
site of Baudrillard’s simulacrum – has already been urged on us via the
immunity churches and cathedrals enjoy from the Project Starlight
men. In its resurrection of religious stereotype (the letter Y might be
considered an iconic representation of the crucifix, and the Troposphere
the soul’s limbo) Thomas’s novel comes dangerously close to the naïve
and anti-intellectual writing of Salley Vickers’s Mr Golightly’s Holiday
(2005). A Baudrillardian or postmodern ending this is not.
It might be possible to read the ‘Epilogue’ as performing a metafic-
tional return to the beginning, in that Ariel realizes her wish to become
‘part of a book . . . an intertextual being, a book-cyborg . . . a bibliorg’
(134), by entering yet another novel by Lumas: The Apple in the Garden,
mentioned in the opening chapter (9, 17). The tree also reflects on her
previous ruminations as to whether being equipped with the ability to
write machine code might mean ‘that if I think a tree, I can make a tree?’
(395). Conversely, the disintegration of her previously highly sophisti-
cated mental life to a state of prehistoric innocence may indicate that
her ‘repair’ to the system – the destruction of Lumas’s book, which per-
haps generated the birth of consciousness in the simulation – has imple-
mented a regressive process of unknowing. But this unknowingness sits
oddly with the heroine’s heretofore so self-reflective voice. If anything,
the unsatisfactory ending to The End of Mr Y demonstrates the impasse
neo-Victorianism faces when it seeks to marry conventional expressions
of Victorian (religious) belief with postmodern metanarrativity. Religion
is the one important feature of Victorianism that neo-Victorian authors,
when they approach it at all (see Chapter 4), attempt to ventriloquize
at their peril.

Where does this leave the neo-Victorian reader? We enter the minds
of the twenty-first-century characters as they enter those of Victorian
figures. In the end all turns out to have been a mind game. There is
nothing outside the text; there is nothing ‘real’ about the Victorians out-
side our imaginary constructions of them. Just as Burlem’s view of the

Troposphere resembles a picture postcard of Victorian London immersed
in fog (382), whereas on her trip to the nineteenth century Ariel’s vision
of a Dickensian fog is blurred at the edges because she never actually
read Dickens and her unconscious, reliant on second-hand information
in constructing the image, invokes the reflection of a reflection (441),
so every neo-Victorian text is inevitably trapped in a metaphorical
Troposphere of its own in which it can recreate, like the shadow art of
the Lady of Shalott or the glassworks discussed in the previous chapter,
nothing but the reflection of its own imagination.
5.4 Death, resurrection, and cinematography in Neil

Burger’s The Illusionist (2006) and Steven Millhauser’s
‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990)
It is this simulacrum of a reflection, the invocation of a quasi-spectral

image of the real, which sustains the conjuring trick in The Illusionist. In
his ‘Special Features: Commentary’ on the film Neil Burger noted that to
him Chief Inspector Uhl’s point that ‘Perhaps there’s truth in this illu-
sion’ represents the ‘key line’ of the film: ‘You have to embrace illusion
to get to the truth’.63 Just as neo-Victorian writers research the period
in order to fabricate fiction from ‘factual’ contexts, so in order to create
convincing stage illusions the film crew was advised by three magicians
(David Blaine, James Freedman, and Ricky Jay, the latter of whom plays
an old-fashioned magician in The Prestige).64 The effects created were,
as far as possible, authentic, and the actors playing the young (Aaron
Johnson) and adult (Edward Norton) Eisenheim were asked to perform
‘real’ conjuring tricks (‘Special Features’, 7:01–7:10, 16:54–17:07).
If The End of Mr Y plays on the illusion of life, Burger and his meta-
filmic hero Eisenheim stage an elaborate game with the illusion of
death. The ease with which death can be simulated and turned into a
spectacle is demonstrated to the audience (both intra and extradiegetic)
early on in Eisenheim’s performance of a mirror trick (21:30–25:32).
That what we are going to see and how we are going to interpret it to
a crucial extent relies on our perceptiveness in relation to our position
vis-à-vis the magician (film director) is intimated in the mise-en-scène,
which involves a large mirror being moved into place on the stage.

While Eisenheim is only visible partially from the back, the audience is
reflected frontally in the moving mirror: the scene to be set in motion
will revolve around the spectators (ourselves) as much as around
Eisenheim and what he does on stage. His instruction to his volunteer –
‘Gaze directly into my eyes. Look nowhere else’ (23:20–23:25) – issues

an invitation to the viewer to become as hypnotized and absorbed by
the deception as she does.
In the act that ensues a member of the audience is given a hooded red
robe (a variation on the black-hooded harbinger of death), positioned in
front of a mirror, and told to wave to the image; the hooded reflection
first complies, but soon develops a life of its own when it is joined by
a second phantom, which proceeds to stab the first. As the ‘reflection’
lies prostrated on the mirrored floor, a ghostly ectoplasm (a feat adapted
from David Brewster’s early-nineteenth-century ‘Dr Pepper’s Ghost’)65
rises from the figure and hovers over the mirror until it is dematerial-
ized by the conjuror.66 This episode constitutes a direct parallel to The
Prestige’s opening gambit; we are shown the trick before we can under-
stand its full significance. The sequence begins as a recognition scene:
in his involuntary volunteer, the Crown Prince’s fiancée, Eisenheim
identifies Sophie Duchess von Teschen. As adolescents Eisenheim, a
carpenter’s son, and Sophie, an aristocrat’s daughter, were deeply in
love, but were forced apart by her parents. An apprentice magician,
Eisenheim then failed in his magic endeavour to make them disappear
together; now, after years of training, the outcome is to be dramatically
different. This is implied in a double entendre when, after the perform-
ance, Eisenheim responds to the Crown Prince’s dismissal of magic with
the remark that ‘Perhaps I’ll make you disappear’ (27:33–27:36). The
message is directed at Sophie who now, at last, recognizes him; it is also
directed at us, issuing a cryptic hint at Eisenheim’s emerging plans.
With its female volunteer Eisenheim’s act presents a version of the
‘Death and the Maiden’ trope, which appeared on film for the first
time in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, the period in
which The Illusionist is set. Georges Méliès’s Escamotage d’une Dame chez
Robert-Houdin / The Vanishing Lady at the Robert-Houdin Theatre (1896)
shows the recording of a performance in which a woman seated on a
chair is covered with a cloth; when the cloth is lifted she is no longer
there; when it is lifted a second time, the spectator is confronted by a
skeleton.67 Méliès trained as a magician before turning to film as a new,
and superior, vehicle for the production of illusions.68 Burger’s film
about a conjuror’s mirror game with disappearance and reappearance,
death and resurrection thus constitutes a self-referential engagement

with the birth of film as the medium which ‘killed’ and ‘resurrected’
stage illusionism, in altered form, in the late-Victorian era. In his
‘Commentary’ Burger notes that he took pains to use the ‘old visual
vocabulary’ and ‘autochrome’ quality of silent film, and refers to his
work as comparable to that of a ‘magician setting up a misdirection’

(9:34–9:35, 42:31, 48:18–48:19).
The misdirection enacted by The Illusionist is twofold. In the case of
the phantom death it consists in giving us a first taste of the grand illu-
sion Eisenheim will operate on Inspector Uhl (and us) when the same
woman, Sophie (Jessica Biel), who in the initial performance of the act
was selected to play the part of volunteer by her then-lover, Crown
Prince Leopold, will later be set up to be ‘killed’ by Leopold and ‘resur-
rected’ as a spectral avenger by Eisenheim. The misdirection here involves
presenting us with an allegory of what is to follow, but of course we
cannot identify it as such at this early stage. The second misdirection
concerns the flashback technique with which the story is narrated.
The film begins with Uhl’s (Paul Giamatti’s) arrest of Eisenheim on stage
as he is in the process of materializing an apparition to the extreme
excitement of the audience. Uhl then reports back to the Crown Prince
(played by Rufus Sewell), who expresses irritation about Uhl’s failure to
‘put an end to it’ (5:37); Uhl assures him that there are only a ‘very few’
‘loose ends of the case’ (5:13, 5:09–5:10). The Crown Prince’s exaspera-
tion with Eisenheim, agent provocateur in his personal capacity as in his
challenge to rationalism, prompts Uhl’s recapitulation of the conjuror’s
life and career. From this point the film follows a chronological sequence
of events, and only at the end returns to flashback in its final illumina-
tion, Uhl’s realization that it was all a trick and speculation about how it
was done. The device of re-narration by somebody other than the central
protagonist casts the veracity of the account in doubt: Uhl cannot know
the details of Eisenheim’s early life, even less the particulars of his ado-
lescent romance with Sophie. Since everything, including the resolution,
is presented through Uhl’s eyes, it must ultimately, as Burger affirms in
his ‘Commentary’, remain ‘all conjecture’ (1:38:16–1:38:18): ‘what he
chooses to believe, what the audience chooses to believe . . . may-be it’s
true, may-be it isn’t’ (1:29:18–1:39:25).
That appearances are deceptive is brought home to us in the latter
part of the film, when the plot returns to the two opening scenes, Uhl’s
arrest of Eisenheim and his subsequent meeting with Leopold, which
now assume a significantly different outlook (representing the ‘magic
turn’ of the film). Not only did Uhl fail to make an arrest because
Eisenheim concluded his final performance with his own spectacular

dematerialization on stage at the very moment of capture, but Uhl’s

subsequent arrival at the hunting lodge is motivated by sentiments
rather dissimilar from those of a subordinate acknowledging defeat:
he comes to charge the Crown Prince with the murder of the Duchess.
When Leopold realizes that he is about to be seized by emissaries of his

father, Emperor Franz Josef I, whom he was plotting to overthrow, he
shoots himself. It is only after his death that Uhl discovers that he was,
after all, innocent, having been framed by Eisenheim for a simulated
murder which served to provide an escape route for the lovers. Since
Sophie had been entrusted with the Crown Prince’s treason plan and
their engagement was a prerequisite for securing the support of the
Hungarian part of the Empire, he would never have consented to her
departure, least of all in the company of his declared rival, Eisenheim,
who had publicly taunted him as a usurper during a private perform-
ance, when Leopold was powerless to lift his sword (dubbed ‘Excalibur’
by the magician), the emblem of his legitimacy as a ruler, until enabled
to do so by Eisenheim.
Here, then, is the third misdirection, followed by the ‘prestige’, the
illuminating disclosure of what ‘really’ (might have) happened: like
Uhl and Eisenheim’s theatre audience, who inferred the identity of
Sophie’s murderer from her phantom appearances on stage, we were
fooled into believing that she was killed by the ruthless Crown Prince,
rumoured to have disposed of a previous lover in just such a manner.
Uhl reconstructs what he believes to have been the sequence of events:
Sophie deliberately sought out Leopold in his hunting lodge to provoke
his anger, using an inattentive moment to drug him in order to make
his subsequent pursuit of her to the stables appear to have taken place
in a drunken rage without endangering her, rode off in an apparent
swoon, and deposited herself in a river shortly before Eisenheim and
his recovery party ‘found’ her chilled (‘dead’) and ‘wounded’ body. The
doctor who showed Uhl the corpse but interfered with its examina-
tion is a fellow professional (the clue for the film spectator is that he is
played by the same actor who initiated the young Eisenheim into his
conjuring career). The gem stone supposedly retrieved from Sophie’s
clothes which Uhl, together with another stone discovered in the
stable of the lodge, identified as missing jewels from Leopold’s sword
are from the very weapon which Eisenheim had previously handled
while performing the ‘Excalibur’ trick. Now Uhl recalls a conversation at
the train station that he overheard between Eisenheim and the man who
later impersonated the ‘doctor’: ‘When it’s done, you will travel ahead
with her, and I will follow’ (49:41–49:46, 1:37:35–1:37:39). Eisenheim’s

necromantic performances after Sophie’s death, Uhl realizes, served

the single purpose of establishing the credibility of his apparitions as
‘real’ entities with superior insight over life and death, thus preparing
the way for his invocation of the Duchess. His public séances indeed
secured Eisenheim enormous popularity among ordinary people: when

arrested during a particularly electrifying spectral show, it was only his
appearance on the balcony of the police station and his disclaimer of
magic (‘everything you’ve seen . . . is an illusion, it’s a trick – it’s not
real’) which dispersed the crowd otherwise ready to storm the building
(1:13:30–1:13:38). Inevitably this repudiation acted as a reinforcement
of Eisenheim’s spiritualist powers.
Only after the description of the ‘Orange Tree’ mystery (a trick that
always baffled him) is passed on to him by a street boy and his pocket
is picked by a man resembling Eisenheim, whom he sees departing
with Sophie’s locket dangling from his hand, does Uhl gain insight into
the conjuror’s final and most superlative act: that Sophie is alive and
Eisenheim has found a way to ensure their permanent union through
their joint disappearance. Just as at the outset Eisenheim had furnished
Uhl, the amateur magician, with the explanation for a minor trick
when he was asked for the mystery of the ‘Orange Tree’ (19:13–21:02),
so now he leaves him with the ‘Orange Tree’ in order to protect, in the
act of revealing to him, his grandest illusion. The film concludes, as it
began, with an image of butterflies: the iconic representation not only
of Eisenheim’s relationship with Sophie (whose wooden butterfly-motif
locket in knowing hands transforms into a heart-shaped pendant)
but also of the ‘Orange Tree’, which stands for Eisenheim’s death and
resurrection stunt.
The ‘Orange Tree’ is composed of two acts: a member of the audience is
asked for a handkerchief, which is placed for safe-keeping in a box (while
secretly being purloined); seeds planted in a bucket filled with soil grow
into a tree bearing real fruit, which is distributed to the audience; one
of the remaining oranges opens to reveal mechanical butterflies carrying
the handkerchief towards the audience (13:20–16:15).69 Just as the tree
serves to hide the handkerchief’s disappearance by focusing the audi-
ence’s attention elsewhere, while the butterflies dramatize the return,
and thus the prior loss, of the object, so Eisenheim’s necromancy was a
means of distracting Uhl’s and Leopold’s energies away from pursuing
too closely the mystery of Sophie’s death, thereby enabling her safe pas-
sage to a secret destination. The subsequent invocation of her ‘spirit’
was calculated both to bolster the illusion of her death and to intensify
speculation about the identity of her ‘murderer’, taking advantage of the

Crown Prince’s increasing unpopularity to inculpate him. Leopold, who

from the start is determined to uncover the secrets of Eisenheim’s illu-
sions (‘How does he do it?’ [5:18–5:19]), becomes their foremost victim.
His death constitutes the end of a tyrant, but it also spells the defeat of
rationality; the Crown Prince was the only character never to be taken

in by Eisenheim’s feats.
The overthrow of this representative of empire hints at the impending
collapse of the established order in the new century. It is no accident
that it is the son of a carpenter and that of a butcher (Uhl, 34:50–34:59)
who, conjointly, bring about the fall of the heir to the throne. In The
Prestige, too, the working-class magician (Borden) ultimately prevails
over his titled and wealthy rival. In both films class issues are implicitly
aligned with race: the Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo is an impor-
tant role model for Borden, while Eisenheim comes to his maturity in
East Asia and later employs Chinese assistants when he embarks on his
most baffling performances. In their exploration of the collision, at the
close of the nineteenth century, of spirituality and rationality, art and
science, illusion and reality, The Prestige and The Illusionist thus co-opt
metaphors of class and race in order to establish conjuring as a category
of cultural, social, and political crisis.
That illusionism is a portent of change heralding the approach
of a new world order is made explicit in the opening sentence of
Millhauser’s story, from which Burger adapted his film: ‘In the last
years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire of the Hapsburgs
was nearing the end of its long dissolution, the art of magic flourished
as never before. . . . Among the remarkable conjurors of that time,
none achieved the heights of illusion attained by Eisenheim, whose
enigmatic final performance was viewed by some as a triumph of
the magician’s art, by others as a fateful sign’ (215). Here there is no
love plot, and the factual Crown Prince, Rudolf, is mentioned only in
passing, with reference to Eisenheim’s first spectral apparition, Greta,
rumoured to be both the ghost of Rudolf’s mistress Mary Vetsera (who
found a violent death with her lover at his hunting lodge in Mayerling),
and that of his mother Elizabeth (230).70 Millhauser’s text is not about
professional-as-sexual rivalry, much less about the quasi-Shakespearean
faking of a death to bring about a lovers’ reunion, but exclusively about
the art of illusionism, the construction of a ‘metafictional sublime’.71
Burger’s film, reflecting as it does on its own status as an artefact, ech-
oes the original text’s self-referential quest, which probes the writer’s
craft in creating and sustaining feats of the imagination. The story
concludes Millhauser’s collection of uncanny and metafictional tales

The Barnum Museum, named after Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–91),

the nineteenth-century American showman, circus owner, collector and
exhibitor of curiosa, freaks, and automata: a version of the Victorian
conjuror.72 The text consistently calls itself into question, drawing
attention to the constructedness and illusory quality of all narrative

by adopting the discourse of hear-say and highlighting the variety of
possible readings.73 Just like Eisenheim’s performance itself, accounts
of it are invariably unstable; concurrence of opinion relates only to
the perceived mastery of his act and its emblematic nature: ‘All agreed
that it was a sign of the times’ (237). Even his fellow magicians are
unnerved by Eisenheim’s move beyond the limits of comprehension
and imitation. The sentiments of Uhl, chief of police, sum up the feeling
of unrest prompted in the profession:
certain distinctions must be strictly maintained. Art and life consti-

tuted one such distinction; illusion and reality, another. Eisenheim
deliberately crossed boundaries and therefore disturbed the essence
of things. In effect, Herr Uhl was accusing Eisenheim of shaking the
foundations of the universe, of undermining reality, and in conse-
quence of doing something far worse: subverting the Empire. For
where would the Empire be, once the idea of boundaries became
blurred and uncertain? (235)
Eisenheim’s greatest challenge is precisely that by unsettling reality

he undermines the spectators’ belief in their own existence.74 As if to
reinstate the disrupted boundaries, the narrative voice (which Burger
adapted for Uhl) strains to provide explanations for Eisenheim’s tricks,
always to find its rationalism confounded by the conjuror’s unfathom-
able artistry. The development of his craftsmanship is orchestrated in
the text by three central acts, which represent the three different stages
of his magic career: from apprenticeship (pledge), through mastery
(turn), to climactic dissolution (the prestige).
The first of these ‘acts’ recounts Eisenheim’s initation into the dark
arts through a foundation myth: the boy was set on his course by an
accidental encounter with a travelling magician found sitting under a
tree, who performed a series of tricks, which he then crowned with his
own disappearance, and that of the tree. This offers an ironic reflection
on the biographical conjuring tricks of factual magicians: in his memoirs
Robert-Houdin, for example, invented the figure of Torrini, an older
Italian magician who saved the young man’s life and adopted him as his
surrogate son, thus launching him on his stellar career.75 Méliès is said

to have been inspired at the age of ten to take up magic after attending
a performance by Robert-Houdin;76 and Harry Houdini named himself
after his spiritual father, Robert-Houdin, whom in his later writings, in an
embittered Oedipal contest, he sought to expose as a charlatan.77 While
many of Eisenheim’s stage illusions are indebted to Robert-Houdin, he is

also modelled on Houdini, whose ethnic (Jewish-Hungarian) background
he reflects; Burger’s Eisenheim additionally draws on the Houdini family
mythology, in particular the legend of his father’s duel with and triumph
over a prince.78
At a second stage, after Eisenheim’s genius has been established with
the account of numerous dazzling feats, his position as the unrivalled
master of magic is confirmed in the monumental clash with other
magicians. (Professional competition was indeed a regular occurrence
among illusionists, and Houdini in particular made a career of invit-
ing challenges, on one occasion summoning the suffragettes to a duel
for the best performance of escapology.)79 Rivalry, the leitmotif of The
Prestige, is here a defining phase in the magician’s evolution. If the ‘first
act’ in Eisenheim’s self-constitution consisted in being given profes-
sional birth by a father figure, this second act is about the defeat of the
father, again mirroring the self-representations of historical magicians.
Provoked by the presumption of a rival, Bendetti, Eisenheim appears to
sabotage his performance through mental suggestion; Bendetti myste-
riously disappears in the middle of an act after entering a trick cabinet.
The arrival of a new, and more powerful, rival, Ernst Passauer, is greeted
with heightened excitement, and mounting audiences watch with bated
breath the war of the titans, conducted through competitive perform-
ances scheduled for complementary sets of weekdays. When Passauer
begins to emerge as the superior talent, Eisenheim stages his victory
by concluding Passauer’s final performance with the disappearance of
his props, followed by the spectacular unveiling of the conjuror, who
turns out to be none other than Eisenheim himself: ‘The audience,
understanding at last, rose to its feet and cheered the great master of
illusion, who himself had been his own greatest rival and had at the
end unmasked himself. In his box, Herr Uhl rose to his feet and joined
in the applause. He had enjoyed the performance immensely’ (225).
This virtuoso triumph of self-referentiality coincides with the close of
the century, ringing in the death throes of the Habsburg Empire.
The final act reveals not only the conjuror’s performance, but his very
person as an illusion. After retiring from the stage for the whole of 1900,
during which he studies photography and cinematography, Eisenheim
returns to launch a new career at the intersection between stage magic

and spiritualist séance. His decision to distance himself from traditional,

nineteenth-century magic is indicated by the paucity of his equipment:
a single chair, a small, glass-topped table, which disposes of the trick
compartments of the conventional magician’s apparatus. The childhood
and adolescent state of his spectres, materialized possibly with a hidden

projector (as is demonstrated to Uhl in The Illusionist in a scene in which
Burger himself makes a spectral appearance),80 is indicative of the infancy
of the cinematographic art Eisenheim has embraced. The enthusiastic,
even hysterical following enjoyed by his apparitions Greta and Frankel
(a parodic adaptation of Hänsel and Gretel lost in the dark woods) and
Rosa and Elin epitomizes the affective appeal of the new technology’s
power to spirit up of forms and project them on to the audience, ‘Greta’
anticipating the later emotive response to Garbo in the 1920s and 30s.
Eisenheim’s identity here becomes blurred as he moves from the per-
formative acts of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century magicians,
Robert-Houdin and Houdini, to those of modernist revolutionaries like
the Soviet film director Eisenstein, whose name his invokes (Eisenstein
was born at the cusp of two centuries, the turning point in Eisenheim’s
career, into a Russian-German Jewish family).81 Eisenheim’s final per-
formance, which stages the disappearance through dematerialization
of the magician himself, symbolizes the way in which stage magic was
being superseded by film,82 as exemplified by erstwhile magicians like
Méliès, who retired from conjuring to take up the new art form. At the
same time this final illusion returns us to the beginning, the old magician
who spirited himself away after performing his tricks and initiating the
new generation into the craft. As in the case of the original foundation
story a new mythology is inaugurated, and Eisenheim’s audience is left
wondering whether Uhl (like the tree in the initiation act, or the orange
tree in the handkerchief trick) ‘was himself an illusion, a carefully staged
part of the final performance’, a variation on the second act’s rival magi-
cian (237); indeed Uhl’s name echoes J.B. Priestley’s uncanny Goole in
An Inspector Calls (1945). The arguments that arise over ‘whether it was
all done with lenses or mirrors’ or, conversely, with recourse to super-
natural powers (237) proffers an ironic metaphor for the magic feats of
neo-Victorianism.
5.5 Conclusion
The creation of a compelling impression of ‘reality’ and the subsequent

deconstruction of this impression as an illusion are the central axes
around which all of the texts and films discussed in this chapter revolve,

and which are key to the strategies of metafictional and metafilmic

neo-Victorianism: historiographic metanarratives that aim to engage
us in a game with their artefactuality. If, as the film theorist Richard
Allen argues, the sophisticated film spectator ‘actively participates in
the experience of illusion that the cinema affords’,83 then the appeal

of metatextual neo-Victorianism lies precisely in its challenge to reader
and audience to derive pleasure from its pyrotechnic performance while
simultaneously remaining attentive to and, able to savour, the complex
operations of its deceptions. ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, The Illusionist
and Affinity summon spiritualism as a metaphor for the neo-Victorian
project of ‘spiriting up’ the Victorian, drawing attention to its strategies
of dissimulation and manipulation which capitalize on the desire for
the uncanny in order to conceal the human agencies at work behind
the scenes. The extent to which we overlook or develop an awareness
of these agencies is dependent on the degree of our compliance with or
resistance to the textual or filmic play with point of view. The Prestige
and The End of Mr Y issue an invitation to reflect on their constructed-
ness by invoking our knowledge of and interest in Victorian science
and poststructuralist theory and yet succeed in deceiving us, just as
Victorian conjurors did their audience in the very act of displaying all
the props. In its compositional structure – an opening offering mislead-
ing clues, followed by a surprise/turn in the narrative, which culminates
in a climactic revelation – metanarrative neo-Victorianism employs the
same performative techniques as Victorian stage magic. In allowing us
insight into how the illusion is produced, if only we ‘watch closely’
enough, neo-Victorianism departs from stage magic, challenging us
from the outset to embrace a double vision which satisfies our desire for
what Baudrillard calls ‘a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth
of origin’84 even as it is engaged in deconstructing it.

6
The Way We Adapt Now: or, the
Neo-Victorian Theme Park

The Victorians had a habit of adapting just about
everything – and in just about every possible direction;
the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings,
songs, dances, and tableaux vivants were constantly
being adapted from one medium to another and then
back again. We postmoderns have clearly inherited this
same habit, but we have even more new materials at our
disposal – not only film, television, radio, and the vari-
ous electronic media, of course, but also theme parks,
historical enactments, and virtual reality experiments.
The result? Adaptation has run amok.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (2006)1
For a combination of reasons, variously suggested to

be insecurity about the present, the undermining of
national identity as a consequence of the European
Union, economic decline, the craze for devolution,
the British seem to be taken up with their own past.
Television’s fascination for costume drama at the close
of the 1980s intensified during the 1990s. With tour-
ism such an expanding industry we seem in danger of
turning the country into a vast theme park.
Robert Giddings and Keith Selby,
The Classic Serial on Television and Radio (2001)2
As we have seen throughout this book, the roots of our neo-Victorian

approaches to the past often lie with the Victorians themselves.
Adaptation of textual materials into a range of other cultural formats
211

is no exception: the previous chapter’s discussion of the (intertextual,

metafictional) trickery of the neo-Victorian magician examined the
nature of the trick narrative as an historically adaptive site. Linda
Hutcheon’s comments on an age of adaptation running ‘amok’ and the
reference to the UK as a ‘vast theme park’ are a telling testimony to

the ways in which postmodernity has generated a range of returns back
to the past, specifically to focusing on the Victorians’ own instincts to
explore and adapt the past and the present into a different sense of the
future. Simultaneously an act of homage and an act of appropriation,
the adaptation straddles the concepts of originality and origins, the
new and the inherited. Perhaps most interestingly of all, in an age of
adaptation what comes into play is not only the dialogue between new
text and old but also the intertexts and interplays between different
adaptations in their own right. We have reached a point, for example,
where a new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility or Great Expectations is
as much about the dialogue between this and earlier adaptations as it
is about the relationship between the adaptation and Jane Austen’s3 or
Charles Dickens’s novels; the same applies to that range of BBC and
ITV serials from the late 1960s and 1970s as they are now positioned
in dialogue with their 1990s and 2000s successors. Andrew Davies,
the most significant adaptor of nineteenth-century literature from the
1990s to the present comments on his awareness of previous adapta-
tions: ‘I make myself watch the old adaptations, so at least if I plagiarize
them I’m doing it consciously.’4 This internalization of the nature of
adaptation, whereby adaptations speak to themselves and one another
rather than only to the precursor text, has led to a paradigmatic shift
in the nature of adaptation itself. What, now, does it mean to adapt
the Victorians? And what are we adapting: the Victorians/Victorian text
or the mediation they/it have already undergone in popular culture?
Does each adaptation move us further away from the Victorians, just
as chronology creates a greater number of years between us and them,
or does this very fact represent a new challenge to adaptors in terms
of how they deal with the issue of authenticity itself? We are aware of
the contexts of what Kamilla Elliott terms the ‘novel/film debate’ and
recognize that the nature of adaptation and the adaptive act must be
registered on their own terms. As Elliot points out, she found it impossible
to write the book she planned on Victorian fiction and film adapta-
tion because it was ‘stymied by problems, paradoxes, and polarizations
in novel and film studies more generally.’5 Recognizing the difficulty
of appropriating certain terminologies across different media, we are
also not arguing here for what Eckhart Voigts-Virchow names ‘the
(untenable) primacy of literature’.6 However, in a culture so obsessed

The Way We Adapt Now 213
with adapting the Victorians, and particularly with the re-adaptation of

the classic realist novel, interaction between the ‘novel’ and the ‘film’
must be foregrounded within such debates because of what Elliott calls
the ‘perplexing paradox’7 that divides the literary from the filmed, and
the way in which the two are read both in criticism and culture.

This chapter explores a number of adaptive sites and their relationship
with the Victorian in contemporary culture. It begins with a discussion
of the nature of recent adaptations and appropriations of Victoriana as
synonymous Dickensiana via TV and the Dickens World theme park.
We briefly place this discussion into the context of a twentieth-century
critique of emergent neo-Victorianism, Brian Moore’s The Great Victorian
Collection (1975), highlighting the fears of fabrication that existed over
thirty years ago about how the Victorians might fit into a world increas-
ingly obsessed with the heritage industry and the functional reality of
the space of the museum, and how in some respects Moore’s nightmare
vision reflects aspects of the millennial presence of ‘Victoriana’ within
the culture at large. In the following section, ‘Lark Rise to Cranford and
back again’, we explore the generic intertextual relationships between
adaptations and the moving dynamics between original text, TV, film,
radio or theatre appropriation, touching on issues related to ‘nostalgia
TV’ on the one hand, and theatrical misappropriation or musical adapta-
tion on the other. Finally, we take the recent work of the adaptor Andrew
Davies as a case study in the internalization of the adaptive process
across both Victorian and neo-Victorian textual engagements.
At the root of our interest throughout this chapter is the nature
of ‘theme-park Victoriana’, which John Gardiner defines as the ‘view of
history in museums, visitor attractions and shops that foregrounds the
interactive and the commercial, favours sensory input and atmosphere
above the dryly factual, and elevates private and local experience beyond
the traditional narratives of national history.’8 What we are inquiring
into here through theories related to heritage, museums, and adapta-
tion is the expression of similarity and difference in dealing with the
nineteenth-century experience, not only in these designated sites of
heritalogical interaction but also in the dominant modes of TV costume
drama and docu-drama.
6.1 Victoriana World: TV, theme parks, and the

object of authenticity
If Gardiner is correct in this estimation of the revealing nature of the

late-twentieth-century fascination with the branding of ‘heritage’,
then the recent furore over the opening of what we might term ‘The

Great Victorian Theme Park’, Dickens World, speaks cultural volumes.

As Colin Sorensen noted in 1989, ‘historic theme parks and heritage cen-
tres probably tell us as much about ourselves as about the past – indeed
probably far more.’9 It is a long-standing trope that Dickens equates to
the Victorian and that much of the mainstream public perception of the

nineteenth century is, in fact, rooted in a Dickensian sense of the period;
as Gardiner himself puts it, ‘Charles Dickens is the Victorian era . . .
“Dickensian” often illuminates “Victorian” rather than vice- versa’.10
The fact that this relationship has become key to the configuration of the
Victorian in the contemporary imagination has provided the owners
of Dickens World with a unique selling point: for if what most of us
imagine as the authentic representation of the Victorians is derived from
our knowledge of the Dickensian adaptation on our TV and film screens,
then Dickens World becomes a magnified and multiplied imitation of
an imitation. It allows us to enter a world where the fictional characters
of Oliver Twist or Hard Times come alive and also come to embody the
supposed fictional-yet-historical individuals they represent. The fact
that Dickens’s texts are themselves often based on parody, grotesque
exaggeration, and the caricature does not deny, indeed rather enhances,
their claim to authenticity. Dickens himself, as Juliet John has noted,
was a (self-conscious) generator of aspects of the heritage industry; as
John states, ‘[t]he image of the uncommercial Dickens is testimony to
an ongoing modern need to sublimate money matters in the cultural
sphere; it is also testimony to the extent to which Dickens commodi-
fied himself for money as well as for the masses.’11 Dickens, then, was
hardly averse to the idea of theme-park merchandizing and the culture
of the commodity, or the commoditization of culture. Quite what
Dickens would have made of the possibilities of the ‘Great Expectations
Boat Ride’, ‘The Haunted House of 1859’ or the 4D cinema housed in
‘Peggoty’s Boathouse’ must remain open to speculation, but the way in
which the Dickens World experience – complete with the opportunity
‘to come face to face with some of Dicken’s [sic] literary characters in
their magnificent rendition of a Victorian town courtyard’12 – attempts
to blur and combine the nature of fiction and fact, literature and reality,
and the ease with which individual characters come back to life, belie
the fact that of course they never lived in the first place. Instead, what
the theme park delivers to the public is a representation of a represen-
tation. That this fiction claims an element of authenticity at the same
time as it seeks to exploit the benefits of modern technology makes it
paradigmatic of a shift in our conscious understanding of the differ-
ence between the Victorian and the contemporaneous. One can, for

example, go to destination 2 on the Dickens World map and discover

how ‘The Victorian School Room meets the 21st Century’ as desks and
chalkboard make way for plasma screens and the world of Hard Times
becomes a state-of-the-art conference venue. The multi-purpose nature
of the venue is itself a point to consider, particularly in relation to the

more recent marketing of the Dickens World experience for wedding
receptions, birthday parties, its now regular comedy club evenings and
‘60s and 70s Dance’ nights.13 We begin to wonder whether it is the
accessibility, affordability and availability of the venue which attracts
customers to these events rather than the ‘Dickensian’ location. The
mind boggles at the Dickensian possibilities of having Miss Havisham
attend one’s wedding reception, for example.
But it is not only in the realm of the theme park that we see such
engagements taking place between the technological advances of the
contemporary sphere and the Victorian imaginary. Andrew Davies’s
recent BBC adaptation of Bleak House (2007) was structurally designed
to mimic the nature of the more authentic (to the Victorians) serial
format; TV audiences were thus asked to buy into the idea that the
instalment plan of sequential episodes was somehow able to bring
them closer to the reading habits of the original publication. A similar
trend might be discerned in Simon Callow’s series of Dickens read-
ings, The Mystery of Charles Dickens (BBC4, 2005), itself a follow-up
to his performance in The Importance of Being Oscar (1998), a mono-
logue about Oscar Wilde. What both these issues seem to mark out is
a desire within the contemporary fascination with the Victorian to
return to a more ‘authentic’ experience of the Victorian text. For an
academic correlative to this we might cite David Barndollar and Susan
Schorn’s ‘Revisiting the Serial Format of Dickens’s Novels; or, Little
Dorrit Goes a Long Way’, where they discuss projects to read Dickens
in monthly instalments at the University of Texas between 1996–1999,
and ‘Dickens by Pixels’, where A Tale of Two Cities was provided online
in weekly numbers to mimic the ‘authentic’ mode of dissemina-
tion.14 All these instances, in their attempts to return to a somehow
more ‘real’ sense of the cultures in which Victorian textual processes
worked, might be placed into a useful contrast with the director Sergei
Eisenstein’s declaration back in 1944 that filmic style itself began
with the Victorian novel.15 As Robert Giddings and Keith Selby note,
adaptations from the Victorian have been part of the nature of British
broadcasting since its inception: ‘[f ]rom the very earliest days, long
before the emergence of anything resembling the classic serial, the
BBC had experimented with narrative prose fiction as the raw material

for broadcasting.’16 They go on to list the frequency with which

Dickens was broadcast on radio, including the staple A Christmas Carol
in December 1925, 1928, 1929, 1933, 1934 and 1935, referring also to
the serialization of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers in 1938; in the
same year an extract from The Pickwick Papers appeared on TV.17 With

more than 75 years of adaptation history behind every contemporary
production of a Victorian classic for TV (and just as much for film),
an often uneasy balance must be struck between the medium and the
adapted text. The importance of Dickens, as Giddings and Selby high-
light, lies in his multiple roles as a national and potently universal
signifier to a range of audiences:
Charles Dickens, original stalwart of the tradition – who provided

much lively raw material from the earliest days of broadcasting –
after a brief eclipse, seems to be in for something of a revival at a
period of immense technical and economic media advancement. His
genial face on our banknotes – an image combining the collective
potency of creative genius, popular culture, national memory, com-
merce and the state – would provide the Barthians hours of useful
contemplation.18
The serialization of Oliver Twist (BBC 2007) perhaps marks the best
illustration of the ways in which we seek even now to relate the
nineteenth-century popular text to our contemporary attraction to
the narrative techniques of the soap opera; EastEnders meets Oliver!
in a culturally hybrid mode that appears to do little to enhance the
reputation of either. In other words, there is a kind of reciprocity and
hospitality at work in the way in which we attempt to return the mil-
lennial media back to the print cultures of the mid-Victorian period
on the one hand, while we need also to recognize how the roots of
modern movie technique, adaptation, and fears over authenticity and
originality can be traced back to the nineteenth century.
In his recent book Original Copy, for example, Robert McFarlane
explores the nineteenth century’s uneasy relationship with ideas of
originality that inevitably, though not always explicitly, comments on
the nature of the authenticity of creation. As McFarlane notes, ‘from the
late 1850s onwards, unoriginality – understood as the inventive reuse of
the words of others – came increasingly to be discerned as an authentic
form of creativity.’19 The nature of the aesthetic as reproduction, the
copy and the inauthenticity inherent within its status as an artwork20
is thus a preoccupation inherited from the Victorians themselves. By its

nature, this is a debate tied up with issues connected to realism, and

coincides with new developments in fields such as photography.21 That
this discussion locates itself in a position between the text and the
image is no accident, and the fact that we remain concerned with
the relationship between the visual – here the televisual and filmic –

and the literary texts on which the moving pictures are based illustrates
yet again one of the many contemporary postmodernist engagements
that have their roots in the nineteenth century.
The adaptation often seeks to project back to the viewers, as we shall
see in the following section, a version of reality that aims to provide an
authentic representation of what they imagine to be the Victorian land-
scape in a way not dissimilar to Scarlett Thomas’s novel The End of Mr Y,
discussed in the last chapter. The adaptation becomes something that we
can relate to at a fundamental level and recognize as comforting, famil-
iar, and homelike in the sense of nostalgic. Dickens World might be seen
as the perfect fusion within popular culture of the landscapes of literary
text, reality, and visual representation. It does for the Victorians what
Disneyland does for cartoon characters: it brings them to life in all their
fabricated, artificial, and inauthentic glory. Of course, Dickens World’s
depiction of the Victorian cityscape as derived from Dickens’s novels in
fact clouds over the issue of how even in the nineteenth century itself
there was a sense in which Dickensian narratives very rapidly became
representative of an alternative version of Victorian reality.
This is something which has started to be satirized by neo-Victorian
fiction writers. It is evident in Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the
Candlelight Murders (2007), a neo-Victorian thriller which in its prose
style mimics Wilde’s verbal wit and which features both Wilde and
Arthur Conan Doyle as the potential suspects in a murder plot follow-
ing the former’s grisly discovery of the body of Billy Wood, one of his
protégés, in an uninhabited house which serves Wilde and companions
as a meeting place. What proves interesting here is the way in which
Brandreth has his character, Oscar Wilde, ever the arch-social critic and
representative of the decadent end of the Victorian period, comment
on the contemporary (both now and 1890s) cult of Dickens, the social
commentator representative of the culture of the early to mid-Victorian
age. In the excerpt below the first-person narrator, Robert Sherard,
persuades Wilde to inform Billy’s mother, a resident of Broadstairs, in
person of her son’s tragic death:
‘He spoke often of his mother. He loved her dearly. He told me that his
mother did not understand him, but that she understood herself well

enough to know she did not understand him. He was a clever boy. And
kind. . . . He had no education to speak of – he could barely read – but
when I read Shakespeare to him, he would memorize the words almost
at once and then declaim them with an instinctive authority, intelli-
gence and feeling that were remarkable . . . Billy Wood had the makings

of what they call “a star”. He was luminous. He shone. He would have
gone far, Robert. . . . I was proud to be nurturing his natural talent. His
loss to me is grievous. His loss to his mother will be terrible.’
‘What sort of woman is she?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘I have dark forebodings about her, Robert,’ Oscar replied, blowing
his nose and mopping his mouth with his handkerchief. He shifted
in his seat. ‘I am not optimistic. You must remember, she lives in
Broadstairs.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked, sensing that Oscar’s mood was
moving rapidly from the elegiac to the playful. Oscar shook his head,
muttering with a sigh, ‘Broadstairs . . . ah me!’
‘What is wrong with Broadstairs?’ I ventured. ‘Is it not one of
Queen Victoria’s favourite watering holes?’
‘Her Majesty is not the problem, Robert. It is Dickens who is the
difficulty.’
‘Dickens?’
‘Dickens! Yes, Robert, Charles Dickens, the late, lamented.
Broadstairs was his favourite holiday retreat. It was Dickens who
put Broadstairs on the map. He wrote David Copperfield there – in
a cliff-top villa that, naturally, now glorifies in the name of Bleak
House. If you are so inclined, you may visit it. There is a twopenny
tour. And if you take it, when you reach the room that used to be
the great man’s study you will learn of the legend that says, “Leave
a note for Mr Dickens in the top drawer of his writing desk and
he will come in the night to read it . . .” Oh, yes, in Broadstairs
the spirit of Dickens is everywhere – he is everywhere. You cannot
escape him, try as you might, because, by way of unconscious tribute
to their most celebrated visitor, the good people of Broadstairs have
each and every one transmogrified themselves into characters from
their hero’s oeuvre. The stationmaster looks like Micawber, the
town crier is Mr Bumble, the benevolent landlady at the Saracen’s
Head takes her cue from Mrs Fezziwig . . .’
‘You exaggerate, Oscar.’ I laughed.
‘Would that I did,’ he sighed. . . .
To my astonishment, when we alighted from the train, it seemed
that Oscar was right. It must, of course, merely have been the power

of his suggestion, but, as we walked the short distance down the hill
from the railway station towards the centre of the town, every passer-
by appeared to be a caricature of humanity, decked out in elaborate
period costume, playing a role in a vast Dickensian pageant. We passed
an obsequious muffin-man who touched his cap to us (‘Uriah Heep,’

murmured Oscar); a fair-haired, shoeless, ragged boy to whom Oscar
tossed a halfpenny (‘Oliver Twist?’ I asked); a beaming, bonhomous,
bespectacled gentleman who raised his hat to us unbidden with a
‘Capital morning, is it not?’ (‘Mr Pickwick!’ we whispered merrily,
together and at once); and several more.22
In Brandreth’s novel the fictive Wilde’s distaste for Broadstairs initially

appears to originate from upper-class snobbery (including the reference
to Shakespeare as indicative of a ‘higher’ cultural sphere than the populist
Dickens), until the parodic display of the town’s Dickensian characters23
merges the satirical with the metafictional. Just as the central charac-
ters in the novel – Wilde, Doyle, Sherard (Wilde’s first biographer) – are
tongue-in-cheek representations of real-life personalities, so some of
the setting is based on actual localities. Broadstairs, a town in Kent, is
home to the Dickens House Museum; the Dickens World theme park
is also located in Kent. Our attention is thus drawn to the factual, con-
temporary, here-and-now context of the Dickensian and by its nature
(neo-)Victorian heritage industry; this inevitably affects our reading
experience. Because it is of our own time, the simulacrum – the Dickens
theme park – for a moment lends a heightened degree of reality to the
invention in the book, by implication conferring greater authenticity on
the Wilde and Sherard characters too, who appear to have much so more
substance than the Dickensian caricatures they encounter on the street.
The French critical theorist Jean Baudrillard calls this an experience of
the ‘hyperreal’:24 the simulacrum ceases to constitute a mere representa-
tion, an image of the real; to us it becomes real, for however fleeting a
moment (see our discussion of Baudrillard’s theory in Chapter 5). If we
apply Baudrillard’s concept to neo-Victorian fiction, we find that here
the third-order simulation works both to conceal and to reveal the text
as an artefact. In the case of Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders,
irrespective of how much we know about the real-life Oscar Wilde or the
real-life Robert Sherard who narrates the story, we will approach the book
as an invention; a pastiche in the form of a thriller. The more familiar
we are with Wilde’s work, the more entertaining we are likely to find the
pastiche; but no reader will be tempted to read the text as a representa-
tion of historically accurate events. The device of the Dickens theme park

has the dual effect of bringing the characters closer to us, making them
more real, and at the same time highlighting the constructedness of
the text: what the Dickensian figures are in the context of a theme
park, the Wilde and Sherard personalities are within the parameters of
Brandreth’s fictional imagination. In neo-Victorian fiction the third-

order simulation that is effectuated by the artificial revealing the artefac-
tual nature of the text thus serves to undermine our desire to consume
these novels as naïve readers, challenging us to probe them for their
multi-layered reinventions of the Victorian in order to throw into relief
the constructions of the contemporary. In Dickens World the opposite
principle is at work: the hyperreal world begins to assert a claim to be a
visualization of the real.
What Dickens World, and to an extent Brandreth’s game with the idea
of 1890s Broadstairs acting as a prototype theme park for the present
day’s Dickens World, reveals is something that has increasingly come to
figure in museological studies; that is the critical and academic theory
behind the nature of museums and heritage centres. Interestingly,
Brandreth’s text plays with the key concept, as Susan Pearce puts it, that
‘museums have . . . become contested territories, where we play out the
representation of cultural variation, and the ways in which we perceive
ourselves.’25 Within this concept, however, there are a series of potential
misattributions between ideas of the real and the imaginary, the original
and the copy, and in this instance the Victorian and the neo-Victorian.
Much of this debate was pre-empted in the mid-1970s by Brian Moore
in his novel The Great Victorian Collection. Moore’s text has relevance and
pertinence here as his pre-heritagization critique of the culture that con-
tinually seeks a return to the authentic object of history (and which blurs
ideas of academic and popular enactments of historical empathy) acts as
a warning about the ideas and attitudes we are in danger of upholding
at this millennial moment.
6.2 ‘Memory fatigue’: The great (neo-)Victorian collection26
The Great Victorian Collection is the magical realist tale of Anthony

Maloney, an assistant professor of history at Canada’s McGill University.
It begins with his arrival in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California on his way to
a conference at Berkeley. After checking into the Sea Winds Motel, din-
ing at a non-descript restaurant recommended by the motel owner, and
then retiring for the evening, Maloney has an ‘extraordinary’ dream,
which involves him having lunch in a pub called The Cheshire Cheese,

‘just off Fleet Street’,27 and finding himself somewhat disgruntled to be

surrounded by other tourists. The dream continues:
There was only one other customer who did not seem North
American. He was a tall man who wore dark, old-fashioned cloth-

ing. I didn’t see his face, but when he rose and left the room I felt
compelled to get up and follow him . . . [I] went outside, and
found myself in an ill-lit alleyway behind the pub. The man in
dark clothes stood, waiting, with his back to me. I knew then that
he had been sent to guide me. The man walked up the alleyway
and, pointing to an oak door at the end of it, beckoned me to go
ahead of him. I went to the door and pushed it open, believing it
would give onto the street. Instead, I found myself in the darkened
bedroom of the Sea Winds Motel, the same room in which I had
gone to sleep. The bed was empty and the bedclothes were disar-
ranged. I went to the window, raised the blind, and looked out at
a pale pink sunrise. Below me was the motel parking lot, large as a
city block. But now the lot resembled a crowded open-air market, a
maze of narrow lanes lined with stalls, some permanently roofed,
some draped in green tarpaulin awnings. I unfastened the catch of
the window, opened it, climbed out on the sill, and eased myself
on to a wooden outdoor staircase, which led down to the lot some
twenty feet below. I began to walk along what seemed to be the
central aisle of the market, an aisle dominated by a glittering crys-
tal fountain, its columns of polished glass soaring to the height of
a telegraph pole. Laid out on the stalls and in partially enclosed
exhibits resembling furniture showrooms was the most astonishing
collection of Victorian artefacts, objets d’art, furniture, household
appliances, paintings, jewelry, scientific instruments, toys, tapes-
tries, sculpture, handicrafts, woolen and linen samples, industrial
machinery, ceramics, silverware, books, furs, men’s and women’s
clothing, musical instruments, a huge telescope mounted on a ped-
estal, a railway locomotive, marine equipment, small arms, looms,
bric-a-brac, and curiosa. As I moved on, staring about me, I became
aware that the stalls were unattended and that my guide had not
followed me into this place. I knew then that all of this had, some-
how, been given into my charge. And, as soon as I knew it, I woke
up. (9–10)
There are clear links here again to the conjunction of the real and hyper-
real as discussed in relation to The End of Mr Y in the previous chapter.

But Maloney’s dream is framed within a set of quite distinct desires not
to be a heritage tourist, that is, to be authentically placed within the
(Victorian) England of the dream. This stimulates his desire to follow the
other, the visionary male figure representative of that authentic experi-
ence precisely because he is so conspicuously non-tourist. No explana-

tion of this figure is ever given in the text; he might be inferred to be
Maloney’s father and simultaneously a representative of a more univer-
sal (and authentic) Victorian forefather. When Maloney awakes, rather
than discovering that it was all a dream, he looks out of the window to
find that everything is ‘exactly’ as in the dream (11) and that he is now,
he feels, the guardian-curator of the memorabilia that have materialized
in the car park, the baton of museum ownership presumably having
been passed to him from the mysterious man who led him there. What
follows is the story of how Maloney and also the community into which
he has imagined the greatest collection of Victoriana in the world are
swamped by TV news crews, journalists from across the US and Canada,
corporations and venture capitalists who want to develop a theme park
around the collection, and academic experts brought in by different
sides to authenticate or disprove the Victorian status of these objects and
adjudicate on whether Maloney’s dream-narrative explanation can be
believed. Alongside this story is a parallel tale of Maloney’s gradual dis-
integration into insomniac madness as he endeavours to dream-weave
new fantasies which might allow him to escape from the constraints of
the Victoriana he has brought into existence. The story, then, is a kind
of parable about the potential dangers of over-interpreting the possibili-
ties of the historical imaginary to create an empathetic communication
between periods. While Maloney originally thinks the collection will
make his fortune, in both financial and intellectual terms, he soon real-
izes it is his downfall precisely because it ties him to objects rather than
individuals, to things rather than people, and to the past rather than the
present. Possessing the past through the appropriation of possessions is
not the same as recapturing the authenticities of the historical experi-
ence, and Maloney’s physical and mental decay during the text might
be seen as a deliberate re-focusing by Moore of the term nostalgia to
encompass the debilitating disease it represented in Renaissance and
seventeenth-century thought.28
The fact that in the three decades since the publication of Moore’s
fiction the neo-Victorian has come to have a growing share in our contem-
porary cultural and aesthetic marketplace and memory, not to mention
notions of ‘national heritage’, suggests that the Victorians have almost
been (c)locked into a kind of thirty year plus cycle of influence, that

they have become institutionalized markers of the (re)passing of time

and fashion for the last century. Maloney’s ‘strange journey’ has been
characterized as Moore’s ‘exploration of hyperreality’29 and the cultural
contexts of the book seem to bear this out. As has been noted elsewhere,
Moore’s novel appeared contemporaneously to works by both Umberto

Eco and Baudrillard30 on the nature of reality and authenticity specifi-
cally in relation to the theme park experiences offered by Disneyland
in the United States. Moore’s book is undoubtedly concerned partly
with the nature of such matters with deliberate reference to the case
of America. His status as an Irish-born adopted Canadian citizen liv-
ing in the United States inevitably raises questions related to national
identity and the (in)authenticities within the perceptions of knowing
what being an American (or any other kind of national) might mean. If
we view Maloney’s narrative as a hyperreality, then the implication is
that an aspect of reality itself must be embedded (and hidden or closed
off) within the fantasy of the story. Perhaps in this instance that reality
is the fact that the world which Maloney inhabits before the appear-
ance of the collection is dominated by the Victorian and Victoriana.
Although the novel is set in Carmel, California, Maloney is there on a
journey that takes him away from his home in Canada, a country that
was both part of the Victorian Empire and remains a part of the British
Commonwealth. Maloney’s home city of Montreal became the largest
metropolitan centre in British North America in 1860 and the financial
and cultural capital of Canada;31 in his turn, Maloney has invested his
intellect and his academic capital in the history of the Empire and its
commodities. Coming from this cultural perspective, an historian like
Maloney would evidently be aware of his move from a nation with a
Victorian past (Canada) into a country with a very public rejection of its
(pre-Victorian) colonial ties with Great Britain (America). This rejection
itself in many ways necessitated the creation of a potential vacuum of
heritage and collective memory.
Moore’s novel critiques the notion of an authentic materialism related
to the Victorians themselves; it challenges the replication of a nation-
ality within a theme park setting and, more importantly, it throws into
relief the inauthentic nature of any endeavour to possess the past. This
inauthenticity is not only grounded in the desire to fabricate and rep-
licate Victorian objects but also in the attempt to place oneself into a
Victorian imaginary. In this respect, Moore’s novel reflects on a cultural
and curatorial anxiety concerning the relationship between truth and
authenticity, memory and ethics within the context of the museum or
exhibition. Maloney’s museology enacts a blurring of the important

legal, ethical and historical distinctions encountered within the modern

museum around the issues of ownership and conservation,32 which them-
selves impact on the nature of collective cultural memory and capital.33
The suicide of Maloney at the end of the novel defeats the notion of
preservation and conservation at a more literal level. What Maloney’s

death means is the removal of the collector from his symbolic relation-
ship to the collection, just as the Victorians are themselves, as Maloney
acknowledges, always beyond physical possibility in the collection in
the car park. The conclusion Asa Briggs makes about the Victorians’
obsession with material objects has relevance for this discussion. In the
final chapter of Victorian Things, entitled ‘New Things – and Old’ Briggs
concludes: ‘The history behind all this [the book] is relevant to the
present as well as interesting in itself. There are always surprises, but as
the wisest interpreters of things . . . have never hesitated to say, would
you know the new you must search the old . . . To forget the past would
be to ignore the future.’34 Placing this into the context of Moore’s novel,
one could argue that The Great Victorian Collection presents both a reflec-
tion on the fascination with Victoriana around and up to the moment
of its writing in 1975 and a kind of dystopic vision of a future governed
by a commercialized (a)historicism where individuals in the present are
trapped within a stifling conceptualization of the past, a world, in other
words, in which innovation and originality become alienated in favour
of fakes that can never be originals and yet are also not strictly speaking
fakes, and where the imagination is trapped in reliving and rematerial-
izing the same dream or ‘false’ cultural memory. Thus Moore’s novel
becomes applicable to our reading of the presence of the Victorian in
the present: the collective sense in which we are all seeking to respond
to something that is both then and now.
As Cora Kaplan points out, as a ‘meditation on the modern obsession
with things Victorian, The Great Victorian Collection explores the late
twentieth-century desire to know and to “own” the Victorian past through
its remains: the physical and written forms that are its material history.’35
But this is exactly the level at which the text seeks to interrogate the very
notion of the possibility of an authentic neo-Victorianism beyond the
level of the fetishized object or the fantasized subject. Thus, while Kaplan
goes on to suggest that the novel is ‘a surrealist exposure of the grotesque
and even dangerous side of the historical imagination’,36 it might instead
be argued that it is the failure of the imagination to be historical or histori-
cized that lies at the core of the problem. Maloney’s imagination is caught
within the impossibilities of maintaining the functions and contexts of the
real, lived present in conjunction with a fetishistic focus on the material

objects of a Victorian subjectivity. The Great Victorian Collection seems

almost to play with our interpretation of the title’s second word: how
‘great’, the text appears to ask, is this Victorian collection given the trauma
undergone by its creator/curator? Or is the greatness of the collection an
emphaticness surrounding its overwhelming power and authority? Does

Maloney become created by rather than the creator of the collection? In
that sense, does he become the prototype (post/neo-)Victorian, literally
succumbing as a subject to the awe of Victorian things?
Moore’s novel is at one level a surrealist fantasy. Interestingly, however,
what it predicts about the kind of Disneyfication of the historical, specifi-
cally the commoditization of the Victorian in the contemporary cultural
and popular marketplace, is pretty close to the mark. What is at stake here
is the issue of (in)authenticity in relation to the objects and productions
of the Victorian. Yet this authenticity cannot help but be questioned
when it comes under the mantra ‘more materialist than thou’ and is
driven by a desire to out-commoditize the Victorians, the great inventors
of ‘things’ themselves and the people who did most to move forward
into modernity while simultaneously dwelling on an ‘antiquarian intro-
spection’.37 Moore’s presentation of a deontological position, in which
his central protagonist is divided between his intuitionist desires and a
decisionist impulse in relation to the aesthetic pleasure to be found in the
objects in his care, and in particular their potential for an ethical hedon-
ism in which the consummation of his desire would rule paramount, is
correlative to our continued fascination with what the Victorians did and
how we can know, even feel, as they did. Making their objects the fet-
ishized commodities of a postmodern culture which thrives on the inau-
thentic, we are caught between the desire itself and the impossibility of
its fulfilment. Difference prevails because this is one aspect of the histori-
cal process that, no matter how powerful or feasible the materialization,
is always beyond the historical imaginary. Indeed, as David Lowenthal
highlights, while ‘[e]very relic . . . exists simultaneously in the past and
in the present . . . [t]o be conscious that things are anachronistic entails
historical insight.’38 It is the inability fully to formulate this sense of the
anachronistic that destroys Maloney’s sanity as he searches in vain for the
possibility of a real memory within the fabric of his authentic collection
of Victorian relics.
One of the more intriguing features of our enduring enthusiasm for
the Victorian, however, particularly as we have turned the millennium
and are thus past the centenary of the death of Victoria herself, is its
presence in an age characterized by Andreas Huyssen as one suffering
from ‘memory fatigue’.39 Perhaps our very instability and insecurity

relating to the recent memories of the twentieth century, from the

Second World War through to a post-9/11 landscape as outlined in
Huyssen’s book, lies beneath our reassuringly nostalgic attraction to the
nineteenth century and the materialist potency of Victorian things.
What the Victorians and their objects represent is solidity and fixity at

a time at which we attempt to transport those objects into the future.
The Great Victorian Collection, though, is a theme park which fails
to live up to our preconceived and partial cultural memory because it
makes concrete and material those things which can only ever exist as
knowable entities in the abstract and illusory; like relics, such things
only mean ‘what history and memory convey’.40
Reality TV shows such as Channel 4’s The 1900 House (1999), The
Edwardian Country House (2002), or more recently BBC 2’s Victorian Farm
(2009) play explicitly on this sense of the tangibility of past things, if
not the possibility to recapture for a sustainable period those past times,
but so do costume dramas and classic adaptations. It is to these genres
we now wish to turn to explore how they too are part of that confla-
tion of present and past in narrative history. They also, in the specific
instances we explore here, bring out various complexities in terms of
the relationship between the Victorian precursor text’s specificity and
its contemporary representation on screen.
6.3 From Lark Rise to Cranford and back again
As Jacques Le Goff argues, ‘The distinction between past and present is

an essential component of the concept of time.’41 But how is this ‘distinc-
tion’ to be visualized when it is part of an adaptive discourse that not
only seeks to negotiate the relationship between past and present, but
the multiple versions of the past available to be adapted? While Dickens
represents the pinnacle of the classic literary serial, the BBC, ITV and the
film companies have sought to branch out from these texts into the works
of other Victorian authors. Within a cultural marketplace and recent
entertainment history saturated in adaptations of nineteenth-century
literature, it is little wonder that there is an increasing sense of inwardness,
even incestuousness, within the sphere of TV adaptation. Perhaps in rec-
ognition of the fact that the dialogue between adaptations was starting to
become obvious in the schedule overcrowding at specific times of the year
(Advent could easily be rechristened ‘The Adaptation Season’), the most
noticeable and recent instance of this trend out of Dickens is to be found
in BBC One’s adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (2007) and Flora
Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (2008–9). The former returned for a

two-part ‘Christmas’ special in December 2009, and both Gaskell and

Thompson adaptations were mercilessly parodied over the same festive
season by Victoria Wood in her spoof ‘Lark Pies to Cranchesterford’.42
Cranford, first shown in five episodes in November and December
2007, is based on three of Elizabeth Gaskell’s stories published between

1851 and 1858: the sketches or vignettes of Cranford, the novella ‘My
Lady Ludlow’ and the short story ‘Mr Harrison’s Confessions.’ Although
related texts, each is very different from the others, a fact displaced in
the homogenization of the narratives in the BBC version, and particu-
larly unnuanced in the 2009 Christmas special with its sentimentality
and romanticized resolution.43 Ironically, ‘My Lady Ludlow’ itself
embodies an historical novel partly set during the French Revolution
which raises significant epistemological questions about the knowabil-
ity and narratability of history, and the nature of social progress; none
of this was reflected in the adaptation of these texts, and such questions
were displaced on to the vague rumblings about the coming of the
railway instead. Lark Rise to Candleford, televized in ten parts between
January and March 2008, and recommissioned for a second and third
series which ran in 2009 and 2010, takes its inspiration from Flora
Thompson’s 1939–43 novel trilogy about late-nineteenth-century pro-
vincial life.44 The close sequence in broadcasting dates, the mirror effect
produced by the titles (Candleford echoing Cranford), the overlap in the
cast of actors, and the affinity of themes (star-crossed or timid lovers,
petty jealousies, tensions between the different social strata, the clash
between tradition and innovation) created metafilmic intertextualities
which cast Candleford as the sequel to Cranford. The title sequence in
each case moved from fields and a nature setting to a Victorian village.
The love-stricken but self-sacrificing Jessie Brown in Cranford, played
by Julia Sawalha, was recast as the feisty, if love-crossed postmistress
Dorcas Lane in Candleford; both women refuse the men they desire for
the sake of their fathers and never cease to regret it. Claudia Blakley’s
Martha, Miss Matty’s loyal maid-servant and later landlady in Cranford,
returned to us in the role of the socially responsible Emma Timmins
with upwardly mobile ambitions for her eldest daughter, the post-office
assistant Laura. The personal tragedies in the life of kind-hearted and
easily contented Miss Matty ( Judi Dench) were comically transmogri-
fied into the melodramatic vicissitudes and antics of the penniless, fun
and beer-loving Caroline Arless played by Dawn French. In the later
episodes Dawn French’s character was taken under the wings of and
kept on the straight and narrow by her friend Emma, and the conjunc-
tion of these two women may have prompted viewers to associate the

pair with Dawn French’s Geraldine Grainger and Emma Chambers’s

Alice Horton (Chambers bears a physical resemblance to Blakley) in the
popular BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley (1997–2007). The Vicar too likes
to indulge (albeit in food rather than drink) and shows a propensity for
attracting embarrassing situations. Just as the bank crash in Cranford, in

which Miss Matty loses her money, offered the BBC a prime opportunity
to remind audiences of its twenty-first-century equivalent in Northern
Rock mismanagement and governmental irresolution, so Dawn French’s
appearance in Candleford brought the neo-Victorian back in the fold of
the contemporary. These intertelevisual elements made both Cranford
and Lark Rise to Candleford into different kinds of adaptation precisely
because they sought to play on the notion of comfortable, familiar
Sunday night entertainment, rather than on any sense of the social
problems that the novelists themselves were trying to explore. That the
technique worked is evidenced by Cranford’s Christmas special for 2009,
a decision no doubt made partly in the light of regular viewing figures
for the 2007/08 series in the region of 8 million; Lark Rise had a regular
audience figure of around 6.7 million.45
The comforting nostalgia associated with the regular classic serial is
located both in its simultaneous otherness from the contemporary and
the reassuring stability of its portrayal of a collective, community-based
past. Linda Hutcheon has identified one of the pleasures of adaptation
as the recognition of repetition; Hutcheon writes that ‘[p]art of this
pleasure . . . comes simply from repetition with variation, from the
comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition
and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing
an adaptation; so too is change.’46 Adopting Michael Alexander’s term,
Hutcheon argues that these texts become ‘inherently “palimpsestuous”
works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts.’47 While this may be
true at one level, we might also want to question to what degree this is a
conscious part of their dissemination to the wider audience. As we argued
in the introductory chapter of this book, there are often two kinds of
readership for neo-Victorian fiction: readers who know relatively little
of the Victorian texts/authors being played with, and another type of
reader who is aware of the ‘original’ text (often an academic) and who
can therefore engage on a more sophisticated level with the nature of
the pleasures within adaptation itself, namely the necessary knowledge
of what is being adapted. The same distinction may need to be made at
the level of the TV, film, radio or theatre adaptation too.
There is also an additional factor to take into account when dealing
with Hutcheon’s comments on ‘repetition’, and that is the way in

which the BBC adaptations of Gaskell and Thompson played on the

idea to the possible detriment of both works. Specifically, the deci-
sion to mirror the casting of Cranford in Lark Rise to Candleford has the
potential to undermine the very real cultural differences between the
two works as adapted, and in the case of Cranford in particular rein-

forces the collapse of sophisticated narrative interpretation at the heart
of Gaskell’s texts. Indeed, following the first broadcast so swiftly with
the second almost allowed for a seamless segueing between them. Just
as Dickens has for so long been equated with the Victorian, so the BBC
made Cranford and Lark Rise blur into the same block of narrative nine-
teenth century in a quasi-amalgamated adaptation, thus reducing the
importance of both novels as separate, distinct, and chronologically
diverse representations of the Victorian period. In circumscribing the
boundaries between the texts, the BBC might be seen to have bought
into the idea that all adaptations of the nineteenth century are really
aspects of the same cultural, hegemonic and homogeneous themes;
that timing itself did not and does not matter within the adaptive
sphere. A similar point could be made about the relocation of Henry
James’s The Turn of the Screw, in some respects a prototype of the late-
Victorian ghost story, into a post-Great War setting in the December
2009 BBC adaptation by Sandy Welch: such dislocation of the temporal
specifics of James’s narrative (a story set in the mid-Victorian period
related in the 1890s) performs a double distancing from the historical
specifics of the narrative as an act, and inevitably loses the impreci-
sion concerning the central protagonist’s reliability at the same time.
If Giddings and Selby are correct in their statement that ‘classic serials
may also be seen as examples of broadcasting ritual, which involves
an examination of the genre as a means by which a culture speaks to
itself, and incorporates an evaluation of shared beliefs and values as
transmitted by the form’,48 then this blurring of distinction illustrates
the ahistoric specificity of contemporary portrayals of the Victorian,
and the past more generally. Although, to use Robert Hewison’s phrase,
we might be witnessing ‘Britain in a Climate of Decline’49 precisely
because it is heritage that dominates contemporary culture, the his-
torical generalism displayed in relation to the past now so ever present
on TV schedules, film listings, and even Past Times catalogues cannot
help but make one wonder what ‘heritage’ means in these contexts. For
surely to know, understand, and even to be obsessed with a shared past
relies on enough sense of historical knowledge to recognize conceptu-
alizations of difference between now and then, and also between the
various forms of ‘then’ on offer.

There is also the danger of seeking to underline the contemporary

relevance of the storyline. In the BBC’s 2001 adaptation of Anthony
Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), the tale of an unscrupulous
financier and a damning indictment of the laissez faire economic
liberalism of the nineteenth century, the parallels with City of London

‘fat-cats’ and in particular the figure of Robert Maxwell became part of a
caricature process. As James Thompson notes, ‘David Suchet’s Melmotte
amounted at times to an impersonation of Maxwell. Assertion of conti-
nuity, or parallels, between then and now were noticeably . . . overt.’50
Indeed, when Suchet acted in the BBC drama Maxwell (2007) it could
have been billed as a sequel to the Trollope adaptation: a true-life neo-
Trollopean tale in a neo-Victorian society. While such comparisons make
the adapted texts’ relevancy to the contemporary world more directly
visible, they also run the risk of hijacking the original texts in the cause
of contemporaneousness.51 In the case of Cranford the collapse of Miss
Matty’s bank and the loss of her savings rightly drew parallels with the
fall of Northern Rock, and served to indicate the ways in which our
current banking system remains largely Victorian in its foundations.
With Flora Thompson’s narrative, however, the repeated focus on the
importance of the Post Office as the core of the community, right down
to tediously mundane 60 minute episodes on the loss of a parcel of fancy
bows from Paris, stretched the contemporary parallels to breaking point.
The adaptation also reinforced the idea of Lark Rise to Candleford itself as
a group of largely humorous tales of village life. In effect, this was the
BBC doing an H.E. Bates on Thompson’s text and trying to emulate ITV’s
success with The Darling Buds of May (1991–93).52 Thompson’s trilogy, on
the other hand, represents a far more realistic and in some senses harsher
version of the bucolic ideal that now finds its place on our Sunday night
schedules. Even in 1944, when Hugh Massingham wrote his introduc-
tory preface to the collection of Thompson’s three texts, it was recog-
nized that in order to get the full import of the narrative(s) you had to
read beneath the surface: after summarizing the three significant social,
economic, and cultural shifts illustrated across Thompson’s novels from
pre-industrial rural life through to the mass modernity and increased
suburban interconnectedness of Lark Rise and Candleford, Massingham
wrote, ‘It is clear, then, that Flora Thompson’s simple-seeming chroni-
cles of life in hamlet, village, and market town are, when regarded as
an index to social change, of great complexity and heavy with revolu-
tionary meaning. But this you do not notice until you look below the
surface.’53 It is questionable whether the portrayal in the three series of
the Lark Rise trilogy really allows viewers (as readers) to ‘look below the

surface’. The plots of later episodes were overladen with incidents of

trifling importance that captured each serial vignette as an image of a
relatively unchanging balance of communities. The episodes served as
weekend entertainments, but did not constitute a neo-Victorian engage-
ment as such with the nature of how to tell the Victorian story now by

doing justice to both the text adapted and the field of contemporary
adaptation.
The mid to late 1990s have been characterized as a period in which
there was a ‘Renaissance of the Classic Serial’,54 and the development
towards the end of that decade and around the millennium of the ‘docu-
soap’ confirms the sustainability of this ‘distinct genre’.55 While Sarah
Cardwell has highlighted the way in which there is often a limited,
canonical range of texts entering the adaptation process (‘Austen, the
Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and so on – [who] tend also to domi-
nate the academic construction and study of English literature’),56 our
concerns here relate to how canonical difference and cultural difference
are subsumed into a homogenized sense of the past, and more impor-
tantly the past as a mirror to ourselves. Frederic Jameson’s prediction in
1991 that we were witnessing the death of the ‘nostalgia film’57 seems
somewhat out of tune with contemporary culture. Although Jameson’s
theories on postmodernism have been key to that term’s development,
as Cardwell notes there is a definite comparison to be made between
nostalgia and the classic adaptation: ‘[n]ostalgia is considered a post-
modern phenomenon; so is television.’58 Indeed, Cardwell goes on to
argue that ‘[c]lassic-novel adaptations could therefore be regarded as the
epitome of our postmodern quest for the past; . . . they, like our quest,
are characterised by a prevailing nostalgic mood.’59 But what nature does
this ‘postmodern quest’ have? What is its intention? To judge by recent
adaptations it is stability, normativity, and universalism, aims that seem
at odds with postmodernity’s faith in fragmentation, flexible notions of
subjectivity, and fluidity in identity and sexuality. As Cardwell reveals,
this ‘postmodern quest’ is derived from ‘a singularly “un-postmodern”
desire for historicism – a determination to understand the present as it
relates to the past’.60 What many recent adaptations appear to present us
with is the past as now. Ronald Thomas’s comment on what drives our
appetite for forms of neo-Victorian adaptation is a telling statement on
the difference between the representation, our interpretation, and our
contemporary preoccupations:
Our desire for a show – or, to be precise, for the moving-picture ver-
sion of a Victorian novel – does not manifest our desire for Victorian

culture or even for Victorian character so much as it does a desire for

historical dissimulation. Liberating us from the repressive hypothesis
of the Victorian subject, this desire manifests modernity’s attempt
to participate in a performance in which the demarcations of differ-
ence between them and us may effectively be dissolved.61

Thomas articulates his faith in the fact that the visual medium is itself
connected to nostalgia when he states that ‘[w]hat we sometimes fail to
remember is that the cinema itself is a nineteenth-century invention . . .
Through the magic of this reel-to-reel device, we make our own ceremo-
nial return to Victorian culture each time we enter a movie theatre and
the house lights go dim, regardless of what title is listed on the mar-
quee.’62 But the idea is more complicated than this, for surely the nature
of that ‘ceremonial return to Victorian culture’ must partly be coloured
by the nature of the Victorian representation on the screen itself. The
‘appropriateness’ or otherwise of an adaptation – stage, screen, or TV –
inevitably raises questions about the reasoning behind it. Is it seeking to
provide a new angle on the nineteenth century, or to make a fast buck?
This is, of course, not only a UK-based phenomenon, nor does it apply
only to television or film. In the US the Victorians have frequently
re-appeared on Broadway stages over the last decade, even, and per-
haps most surprisingly, in the form of two plays based on the life of
John Ruskin.63 To take a UK example, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical
version of The Woman in White (2004) may well prove an entertaining
version of Wilkie Collins’s original 1860 novel, but the sensation it
provides within a theatrical/musical context will be very different to the
original ‘sensational’ nature of its publication. Whether a comparison
can be made between the sinister portrayal of Count Fosco in Collins’s
text and his all-singing, all-dancing, Michelin-man representation in
the song ‘You Can Get Away With Anything’ (‘Put on a good show!/
Always Count Fosco he puts on a good show!’), or between Collins’s
narrative and the musical Laura Fairlie’s ‘If Only I Could Dream This
World Away’ is another matter. The following lines from Fosco’s lyric
might even provide an apt summary of the commercially-driven aspects
of neo-Victorianism in popular culture:
I live to push the boundaries,

to break the rules, in short
One must be something of a bounder
if one intends to play this game
There’s only one thing that one has to have

one has to have

no shame
Yes I can get away with everything because I have no shame.64
Lloyd Webber can of course play on the disclaimer beneath the musical’s

title that this is ‘Freely adapted from the classic novel by Wilkie Collins’,
and there is no reason why he, the lyricist, the director Trevor Nunn,
and even Lloyd Webber’s brother Julian (for whom Lloyd Webber wrote
The Woman in White Suite for cello and violin, 2005) should not seek to
benefit by providing the kind of adaptations for which there is an evi-
dent marketplace. Yet it does seem revealing that while Lloyd Webber’s
Victorian forebears, Gilbert and Sullivan, were writing operettas that
provided astute social commentary and political portraits of the nation’s
leaders (think of the Gladstone-esque performance in Iolanthe, 1882), the
contemporary alternative in the musicals is a rather low-brow and ‘free’
imitation of ‘classic novels’. Robert Stam has theorized aspects of this
desire for ‘faithfulness’ to the original text and argues that such criticisms
are misplaced: ‘When we say an adaptation has been “unfaithful” to the
original, the very violence of the term gives expression to the intense dis-
appointment we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what we
see as the fundamental narrative, thematic, and aesthetic features of its
literary source.’65 Stam continues that fidelity as an ideal is both impos-
sible and undesirable, partly because the move to a different medium
cannot hope to sustain or replicate our sense of the textual reality of the
original. While we have sympathy for Stam’s critique, there does remain
nevertheless the uneasy sense that this provides a potential blank slate
for the developments of adaptations that bear little but the name of the
original, which is then used for trading and commercial rather than
aesthetic and innovative reasons. If adaptations do not add something
to the portrayal of the original narrative but instead detract from it, what
is their role in the cultural sphere?
The dance production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
raises a similar question. Choreographed by Matthew Bourne, Dorian
Gray premiered in August 2008 at the Edinburgh International Festival
before embarking on a UK-wide tour to rave reviews and numerous
award nominations. Speaking to a journalist in an interview about the
adaptation, Bourne comments that
[t]here is quite a lot of Wilde in it . . . the story of this beautiful young

man getting corrupted inside has been pushing me into deeper,
darker areas. But I wanted to make the story more contemporary,

so . . . had a lot of discussions about period. At first we were think-

ing of the 1960s, but that’s a period we love and keep going back to.
I wanted to push us outside our comfort zone. So we’re setting it in
the present – which is quite scary for us.66

The decision on when to set the production ties in with a clear sense of
the retro culture of the late 1990s and the millennium. This is a period
in which restoring Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s houses back to
their ‘original’ state coincided with a semi-anachronistic retrospective
approach to 1960s and 1970s fashion, music and culture in general.
It also reflects an anxiety about the possibilities of being ‘authentic’
(or rather of being judged inauthentic) to a particular period. When
Bourne’s collaborator, in the same interview, comments on the need
to ‘get it right’ in ‘details of style’, he is referring not to the dangers
inherent in a retro setting (is everything a period piece of the correct
period) but to the fact that ‘Everyone in the audience knows as much
about the present as we do. They all go shopping.’67 As a combination
of the commercial and the cultural, the statement ‘They all go shop-
ping’ serves to encapsulate one of the dangers of the free market in
adaptations as much as in stocks and shares. This commodification is
heightened through the portrayal of Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray
himself in the dance: since they are no longer cast as painter and artistic
model, the performance also removes the portrait as a metaphorical
device in favour of Dorian’s beauty being ‘immortalised through an ad
campaign’: ‘So Basil . . . is going to be an iconic photographer, someone
like Annie Leibovitz, and Dorian is going to become the face of a new
perfume, like in a Calvin Klein ad.’68
In one sense, the photograph and the stylish modernity of the
adaptation serve as contemporary signifiers of the kinds of position-
ing suggested in Wilde’s novella, yet in another they present the
odd prospect of the public marketing of what in Wilde’s text is a
deliberately private, hidden, and ambivalent dialogue between self
and ego, reality and fantasy/nightmare. Will Self, in his novel Dorian
(2002), engages in a similar higher technological game by using a
media installation and drugs where the dance uses photography and
fashion. Both adaptations, however, inevitably return us in some
ways towards the meanings in which Wilde himself was simultane-
ously trying to be and not be of his cultural moment. For that, at
least, they deserve some credit. Their engagement with the retro-
spective nature of adaptation, however, raises questions about how
texts become not only adapted but translated into different cultural

moments. Where the Victorians drew on myth and the mediaeval

for their interpretation of contemporary social and cultural concerns,
we instead return to them as figures of equal distance and seemingly
transferable frames of reference. The difference, however, is in the term
‘revival’. Victorian revivalism delivered a sense of purpose beyond the

adaptive in the fact that the revival of an earlier period – such as the
mediaeval – served not so much as a visual or fashion statement, but
rather reflected a political position, invoking an ideological inherit-
ance at the same time. The fact that this ideology was idealist in nature
does not diminish the fact that the past to the Victorians themselves
was partly didactic and functional: William Morris’s emphasis on the
beauty of craftsmanship, for example, was as much driven by socialist
principle as public taste. Peter Bowker’s serial comedy-drama Desperate
Romantics (BBC2, 2009) recognized the radical political and cultural
roots of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s origins while at the same
time supplying plenty of sex and drugs. As the title screens to each
episode declared: ‘The “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” were inspired
by the real world about them, yet took imaginative licence in their
art. This story, based on their lives and loves, follows in that inven-
tive spirit.’ Disowning a sense of authenticity or factuality, the series
gave itself the freedom to reinvent the Brotherhood’s narrative firmly
within a post-millennial sensibility pre-occupied with sex.
What contemporary adaptations of the Victorian text do in the case of
Dorian Gray and others, however, is utilize the precursor text as a means
to reflect the ideology of the present as divorced from the past. The dif-
ference between retro and revival, between translation and adaptation,
is drawn along these lines. The 2009 film version of Dorian Gray (of
which we can catch a showing at Dickens World’s cinema), directed by
Oliver Parker, who previously directed Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1999)
and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), thus enhances and makes
more prominent the unspoken elements of Wilde’s text, particularly in
relation to the potential violence of Dorian’s character. But it is largely
impossible for the text to be filmed in a way that makes it reflect Wilde’s
manifesto in his ‘Preface’ concerning the Victorian fear of realism being
the rage of a Caliban seeing himself in the glass. Such a specifically 1890s
mantra cannot really survive the extension of the film’s time frame to
the 1920s to encompass the First World War and a suffragette who tries
to redeem Dorian’s soul. To carry the Caliban glass motif through would
mean recognizing the threat that such an adaptation has to pose to the
contemporary audience in relation to their own lifestyles, to blur their
public and private faces through the mirror of the text. Parker is unable

to do this not only because an adaptation invariably changes its precursor

but also for the simple reason that the adaptation has been made in a
period in which no such distinction is acknowledged. If there were a
Dorian today, then his canvas carcass would probably occupy the fourth
plinth in Trafalgar Square and be entered for the Turner Prize.

Ultimately, what each of the examples given briefly here illustrates,
from the adaptation of Gaskell and Thompson’s novels through to Lloyd
Webber’s take on Wilkie Collins and Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray, is
the way in which the Victorian has become fair game for an ahistoric
sense of the adaptive. Blurring the distinctions not only between then
and now but also between adaptations of very different texts, the BBC’s
recent work on Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford raises fundamental
questions about neo-Victorianism on the screen. Collapsing difference
into similarity might be an easy way to make the audience feel com-
fortable and provides a sense of reassurance that the adaptation itself is
part of a nostalgic return to an older-style, traditional Victorian sense of
‘home’, but in reality it does justice to neither the original text(s) nor the
modern viewer. Adaptation is a complex business with varying demands
and a mixture of successes and failures that would have been recognized
by many a Victorian writer. In the following section, we look at the
example of the single most influential adaptor of the Victorian and neo-
Victorian texts, both highs and lows, in this period: Andrew Davies.
6.4 ‘I’m not sure how much of a Dickensian I am really’:

The adaptive affinities of Andrew Davies69
In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1987 novella Cuts the juxtaposition between

the high-impact media corporation Eldorado Television and the shabby
Victorian university that stands alongside it is sharply drawn. But
perhaps more dramatic than the division between academic, high
cultural, and populist accessibility figured in the physical appearance
of these two institutions representing the solidity of the nineteenth
century versus the glacial sheen of the contemporary is the discus-
sion that takes place concerning the costume drama Gladstone, Man
of Empire. These production debates come to a crisis when one of the
actors, Sir Luke, declares after having read the script, ‘I simply find it
hard to believe that Mr Gladstone ever appeared in the nude before
Queen Victoria at Windsor . . . And even more unlikely that he did so
while playing the ukulele.’ As the executive Jocelyn Pride points out
to him, however, ‘[T]his is a drama-doc . . . It’s fictionalised verity. You
take real people and events but you’re not slavishly bound to actual

facts.’70 Adaptation of history, the media moguls suggest, is fair game

in the interests of audience attraction, and ‘fictionalised verity’ serves
as the modus operandi of the adaptor’s work.
Although this book is concerned with the period 1999–2009,
Bradbury’s 1980s satire of Thatcherite adaptation, with its play around

the idea that the period itself is an intentional appropriation of those
‘Victorian values’ so esteemed by the Iron Lady, and David Lodge’s
contemporaneous companion piece Nice Work (1988) illuminate the
contexts of contemporary adaptation of the Victorians around the mil-
lennium. As already indicated above in the discussion of The Way We
Live Now, turning to the Victorians as representatives of something
stable, secure, and comparable to us moved into a new context around
the year 2000; indeed, it is possible to mark part of this turn in one key
figure: Andrew Davies.
If the BBC costume drama represents a safe bet in terms of generic
cultures of consumption, then the name of Andrew Davies is a guar-
antor for the viewing public of the ‘authentic’ adaptation. Davies has
built a reputation for the reinvigoration of the classic serial format
over recent years and through ‘his distinctive “televisual” aesthetic’.71
His identity as an adaptor of nineteenth-century, particularly Victorian
contexts has made him a cultural authority on the Victorian and
neo-Victorian literary spheres. Through a Davies adaptation not only do
Victorian texts come to life on the screen, but also the contemporary
filmic techniques seek to mimic the Victorian format of the serialized
novel. Davies’s two most recent experiments with this format – Bleak
House and Little Dorrit – usefully offer themselves up for comparison
given the quite significant disparity in their reception by the view-
ing public. Davies’s attempt to emulate the serialization format was
perceived both by the public and within the costume drama industry
as one of the unique selling points of his adaptation of Bleak House.
Gripped by the attempt to invert the contemporary familiarity with the
soap opera format and its reputation for dealing with cutting-edge social
issues into a Dickensian retrospective, audiences applauded the regu-
larity of the serial’s instalments and BBC executives rejoiced in the hook
this provided into their weeknight viewing figures. Moving the tradi-
tional location of the costume drama from 9pm on a Sunday evening
slot into the weeknights and ensuring that the Victorian soap opera
followed the BBC’s flagship production in this format (EastEnders)
guaranteed that parallels between Victorian and contemporary realism
would be drawn; one of the directors of the Bleak House adaptation,
Justin Chadwick, came from experience on EastEnders.

However, while the award-winning Bleak House served as a pinnacle

of Davies’s reputation for the delivery of condensed, accessible, and yet
textually authenticated adaptations, the sequel serial, his adaptation of
Little Dorrit (2008) failed to make the same conceptual and entertainment
connection with the public, although it has won more recent critical

acclaim.72 By the end of its weeknight run it was attracting audience
figures of only around 2.5 million, which is dwarfed by comparison with
the regular 8 million viewers for Cranford, and even the 6 million who
tuned in repeatedly to Bleak House in its weeknight slot (up to 9 million
viewers per week including the weekend omnibus slot). More viewers
watched Little Dorrit on the weekend omnibus edition,73 but the figures
were still not as high as might have been anticipated for a serial of this
kind, made by the BBC and with the Davies brand attached. In January
2009 the BBC announced that it would concentrate less on classic adap-
tations of the nineteenth century over the coming years, and instead
refocus its dramatic output towards more contemporary films and serials
about twentieth-century history (such as the recent Diary of Anne Frank,
2009) and literature post 1901 (see The 39 Steps, also 2009).74 This is pos-
sibly part of the BBC’s growing awareness of its own parodic position in
relation to classic adaptations: one of the biggest radio hits over recent
years has been Radio 4’s Bleak Expectations (two series have been broad-
cast, 2007 and 2008, both written by Mark Evans), a serial which has
mercilessly and very entertainingly pastiched the Dickensian framework
of the Victorian narrative through the use of Dickens’s plots and also
absurdly significant names such as the villain ‘Mr Gently Benevolent’ or
the arch-foes of the hero being the entire family known as ‘Hardthrasher’,
the first member of whom is encountered as the Headmaster of the
school ‘St Bastard’s’. The series also cleverly juxtaposed itself as narrated
text rather than televisual performance. The drama of the programme is
driven by the account of the life’s writing through the retrospective posi-
tion of Sir Philip, formerly ‘Pip Bin’. Through radio, therefore, there is
an invocation of the textual process of writerly creation, the Dickensian
public readings and the performativity of the original text, all of which
cannot be accommodated within the television adaptation in the same
way; Davies has himself talked about the difficulty of representing
the figure of the author in visual adaptations.75 The popularity of the
radio series Bleak Expectations is no doubt partly drawn from its tongue-
in-cheek approach to adaptation, partly its absurdist plot stands, and
also, perhaps most importantly, its satirical approach, which undercuts
and derides any audience desire to take it seriously. As a reflection of
the BBC’s attitude towards the classic serial it serves as a useful reminder

that one must always be alert to the dangers of over-serious readings of

adaptations themselves, an issue which perhaps came to light in the Little
Dorrit adaptation.
Assessing audiences and their responsive tastes is notoriously difficult,
given that television viewing is subject to a range of external forces and

pressures outside of the media executive and adaptor’s control. Yet the
distinct difference between the reception of Bleak House and Little Dorrit
inevitably raises questions about the possibility that either the latter
adaptation did not provide what audiences sought or that the original
text of Dickens’s novel was not able to make the transfer into a Davies
adaptation. Boyd Tonkin, writing in The Independent, balanced out the
positive and negative sides of the debate but also revealed an important
sense of absence in the adaptation itself:
Mr Dickens has returned to the screen, courtesy once more of

Mr Andrew Davies. That tireless workhorse of classic adaptation has
now pulled Little Dorrit into the public square. As splendid a show
as ever we saw, some cry: Victorian London as squalidly gorgeous as
ever; a capital troupe of our finest thespians striking poses, making
faces and contorting voices to a standard that leaves the world in
awe; every creaking gate and dripping chamber stylishly distressed
to within an inch of its grimy Gothic life.
Stuff and nonsense, snorts the rival camp. This heritage drama
plumbs unprecedented depths. One thick slice of histrionic ham
drops on another, wedged between turgid doorstops of unfathom-
able plot. Costumed camp addles the senses of its twee antiquarian
followers. This reactionary rabble would nominate the cast and
crew of Emmerdale for Baftas if only they snuck in some crinolines,
bustles and the odd steam-engine.
For an author so frequently dramatised, Charles Dickens has almost
become invisible. Everyone appears to know what they think about
the novels, the adapters and the actors.76
The contradictions and tensions here are typical of the response gener-
ated by Davies’s work on Little Dorrit, but less so in relation to Bleak
House. What is being underlined is the familiarity of things as part of
the comfort of the adaptation – the scenery of London is ‘as squalidly
gorgeous as ever’ as an ostensibly positive sign, yet the ‘depths’ of the
‘unfathomable plot’ appear to get in the way of the visual pleasures to be
found in such squalor. We want it to look terrible in a sublime way, but
we also want it simple, intelligible, uncomplicated, and also unmediated

by the familiar knowledge of the space it inhabits. It is interesting that

‘heritage drama’ is here deemed negative rather than part of a cultural
positive. The fact that ‘Mr Dickens’ and ‘Mr Andrew Davies’ are por-
trayed as a related double act of Victorian advertising is also important,
because Tonkin and others who criticized the adaptation never really

pin down whether the faultlines are divided between these two figures:
is Little Dorrit hard to adapt (Dickens’s problem) or did the adaptor not
have his magic touch this time (a problem for Davies and the BBC)?
Part of the problem does appear to be located in the artifice of the
production. The actors and their script are identified as a block between
audience and ‘authenticity’ partly because they appear to be hamming
it up and partly because they are a ‘reactionary rabble’: they are too
familiar to serve the purpose required of contemporary adaptation, and
one suspects the fear is that their invoked presence of other televisual
experiences is part of the filter that does not allow for the adjustment
to the specifics of the adaptation in hand. There is also, of course, the
issue of knowing and not knowing Dickens, here invoked by Tonkin as
an ‘invisible’ presence in the adaptation.
In this context it is worth exploring the issue of how TV adaptation
of Victorian texts demonstrates the dual function of providing a con-
temporary re-interpretation in line with Karen Chase’s suggestion in
the epigraph to this book’s Introduction that each age has to reinvent
Middlemarch, and yet also needing to remain ‘authentic’ to the Urtext.
Chase’s collection contains an essay by Jakob Lothe which explores just
such an issue. In ‘Narrative Vision in Middlemarch: The Novel Compared
with the BBC Television Adaptation’,77 Lothe specifically discusses how
Eliot’s third-person narrative vision is represented on film, in this case
the 1994 BBC adaptation, and ‘the different problems and possibilities
as far as the transformation from verbal prose to film is concerned.’78
What Lothe suggests is that ‘watching an adaptation, we see what is
presented on the screen rather than what the literary narrator makes
us visualize as we read’.79 In this sense, the visual adaptations explored
in this section could be connected with the filmic ‘magic’ discussed in
Chapter 5 in relation to the films The Prestige (2006) and The Illusionist
(2006). What the film about nineteenth-century magic requires of us is
a kind of disbelief or an ability to see but not read (as in understand) the
images presented to us until the director has created the desired impact
of understanding. Similarly, the adaptation of a novel from the Victorian
period has to make us believe as much in the mode of the narrative
and its storytelling practice as the events contained within it. Lothe
seems somewhat cautious about exploring the issue of different media

in these terms, and one can see why. The danger, which he pre-empts,
is that such a comparison might be perceived as ‘critically dubious’80
precisely because it blurs the requirements of very different forms of
textual engagement. Yet Lothe’s reading along this route proposes a very
interesting take on the relationship between the precursor text and the

adaptation which has particular relevance to other neo-Victorian adapta-
tions. Lothe comments that
it is natural to link the implied author to director Page’s imprint on

the film: the combined result of his choices, priorities, and decisions
during the process of filmmaking. Yet since this particular film
is an adaptation, Eliot is an ‘implied coauthor’, that is, an implied
author whose story, ideas, and value system Page both represents
and interprets.81
Combining the figures of director and author in this way, Lothe

extrapolates a relationship based in the idea of collaborative auteurship
which locates itself in the directorial figure rather than the author of
the adaptation. Revealingly, the director is positioned as the figure
of authority in this relationship, and Andrew Davies is only mentioned
in an endnote reference to Lothe’s essay, and yet the 1994 version of
Middlemarch really served as the starting point of Davies’s reputation
for the great Victorian adaptation; the perhaps now better known Pride
and Prejudice came in 1995. In April 2007 it was announced that a
new film version of Middlemarch to be directed by Sam Mendes was in
production, and that Andrew Davies was providing the script for this
new adaptation.82 As an indicator of the truth of Chase’s comments
about each generation reinventing Eliot’s text this could hardly be sur-
passed, implying as it does that Davies’s Middlemarch of 1994 and his
Middlemarch of 2010 would and will be able to encapsulate a different
approach because of the 16 year interval between them; in an inter-
view, Davies comments that the shelf-life of an adaptation is ‘about
ten years’ and that he ‘might come back in twenty years . . . and have
another go’.83 The fact that this reinforces the kind of internalization of
adaptation mentioned above in relation to the BBC and ITV recasting
of the classics on a twenty year cycle offers us an additional argument
in favour of the incestuous reading of costume drama adaptations
of the Victorian classics. In this respect, it also draws a distinction
between the academic climate of the moment and the ongoing signifi-
cance of reclaiming and recovering ‘lost’ works of Victorian literature,
and instead recalibrates attention towards a continually replenished

and recast (both as in redesigned and as in being equipped with new

star actors of the present in the roles), singularly homogenized narra-
tive of the ‘Victorian’ on screen. Adaptations are intimately connected
with ideas of the canonical, both drawing on and supporting canonical
positionings of individual writers. But as we can see, they are also in

the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century continually engaged
in processes of self-canonical recognition. Where in the past different
Dickens or Eliot novels might be identified as holding specific posi-
tions within the cultural awareness based on the number and quality
of different TV or film adaptations of their work and an internal canon
might have existed between a 1970s BBC version and a 1990s version
of the same text, now we are entering a period where there is the pos-
sibility of a Davies canon in which different adaptations of the same
text battle for the supremacy of cultural recognition.
But if Davies has earned his reputation through the adaptation of
Victorian texts, it is also important to recognize the influence he has
held over the adaptation of the neo-Victorian. Davies’s work on the
adaptations of two of Sarah Waters’s turn-of-the-millennium novels
(Tipping the Velvet, 1998, and Affinity, 1999) has ensured that, for critics
at least but also one suspects for the larger audience, Waters’s work
has somehow become ‘classicized’ through the process, right down to
the Hitchcockesque cameos. Just as we noted above that the seamless
transition for the audience between Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford
led to the conflation of the two different periods of each group of texts
into a single narrative viewpoint of ‘the Victorian’, so Davies’s adapta-
tions of Waters’s neo-Victorian novels might be read as a bridgeless
segueing between the Victorian text and the neo-Victorian revision of
that text. Importantly, such compounding of adaptive sites also acts
as a potential indicator of the ways in which Davies’s and Waters’s
works are in dialogue with each other rather than the Victorian period
or a precursor text. If we follow Lothe’s line that George Eliot and her
director Anthony Page are in some respects ‘co-authors’ of the 1994
Middlemarch, then this also becomes true of Davies’s and Waters’s work.
Potentially, this makes the adaptations far more concerned with the
contemporary (the double influence of the now in the collaboration,
for example, rather than the collective influence of then and now) than
it does with the refraction of the nineteenth century through the lens
of the contemporary camera. Waters’s novels are themselves engaged
in that prismadic relationship with the earlier narratives on which she
draws from the Victorian period. This might suggest that there is a col-
lectivization of the experience of reading the Victorians being brought

to a wider audience while also sustaining a commitment to new drama

and contemporary authorship. However, the fact that Davies’s adapta-
tion of Tipping the Velvet (BBC 2002) will be remembered as much for the
golden phallus/dildo as anything about the narrative of women’s rights
presented in the novel is surely problematic.

This problem is made more apparent in Davies’s recent adaptation
of Waters’s second novel Affinity (ITV 2008). In an ironic inversion of
Davies’s other work, where the sexual undertones of Victorian texts
have to be brought into a contemporary/late-twentieth-century con-
text through more tactile relationships between characters, a different
discourse register and even the visual addition of a wet shirt, in the
case of Affinity Davies’s adaptation heteronormativizes Waters’s text
through the additional character of Margaret Prior’s fiancé. Theophilus’s
attempted rape of Margaret is a pivotal scene in her demonstration of
sexual (rather than emotional or displaced psychological) affection
towards Selina Dawes. The adaptation suggests that there must be a
reason why Margaret is awakening to a lesbian consciousness during the
course of the film, and that reason has to be grounded in a trauma-based
revulsion from men. Compared to the narrative of Tipping the Velvet
(both book and adaptation) this is a reduction of the possibilities for a
positive construction of same-sex desire. While Davies maintains some
flashback reminiscence scenes that allow us to conjecture things about
Margaret’s prior relationship with Helen, there is nevertheless the
implied context of the ultimate denial of penetrative intercourse with
her fiancé to explain her feelings for Dawes moving from affection to
post-traumatic sexual longing.
This is not to attempt to mark out a gender-specific point about the
relationship between adaptor and writer, or to argue for the need for
male adaptors to keep clear of women writers’ work. It does, however,
raise an important issue about the marketing and marketability of
the contemporary Victorian adaptation. What role(s) does it serve
within the larger context of Victorian costume drama? What is more
fundamental – the relationship to the present, or the capturing (even
mimicking) of the Victorian past? There is also, in this specific case of
Davies’s adaptation of Affinity, an important point to consider con-
cerning the thematic connections between Affinity and Little Dorrit. It
is possible that Waters’s rendering of the possibilities of ‘deviant’
sexuality within the setting of a prison owes not a little to the con-
junction of the central image and one of the sub-plots of Dickens’s
novel Little Dorrit, namely the Marshalsea prison and the relationship
between Miss Wade and Tattycoram. There is thus again the potential

for a slippage between adaptive sites, given that ITV’s broadcast of

Affinity at the end of December 2008 coincided relatively smoothly
with the final episode of Little Dorrit (it followed two weeks later).
This suggestive sequential arrangement promotes the idea that, just as
contemporary concerns can be blurred with the Victorian text to be

exploited and explored, so too links can be made across the serializa-
tions derived from texts in both periods. The thematic connections
between the Victorian ‘original’ and the neo-Victorian reinterpreta-
tion function once more as a telling reflection on the palimpsestuous
nature of adaptation identified by Linda Hutcheon.
6.5 Conclusion
Adaptation is a fundamental part of neo-Victorianism as a concept

because all engagements with the Victorian in contemporary culture
that fulfil the metatextual and metacritical requirements we set out in
this book’s introduction are necessarily adaptations or appropriations –
be it of plots, characters, or intellectual concerns and cultural preoc-
cupations. Adaptation is by its nature an evolving form, and one which
we have inherited from the nineteenth century. As David Lowenthal
states of the Victorians, ‘[n]o people since the Renaissance combined
such confidence in their own powers with so much antiquarian
introspection’,84 while Elizabeth E. Guffey comments on how contem-
porary retro culture, although different from the Victorians’ sense of
the retrospective, nevertheless invokes aspects of ‘Victorian revival-
ism’.85 Looking forward, perhaps our own contemporary confidence in
our technological, materialistic and financial supremacy is at the root
of our return back to the Victorians. However, recent decades have,
it seems, moved us into a period where the innovative and dramatic
nature of the classic serial has shifted on to a contradictorily safer,
yet risqué, portrayal of the Victorians on the large and small screen,
on radio and even in the musical. The fact that this is coupled with a
return to the theme-park-cum-freak-show mentality of Dickens World,
so clearly identified as a possibility by Brian Moore in his 1975 novel,
and accompanied by a material notion of nostalgia as things, possessions
and objects either from the past or fabricated to imitate items from the
past, might possibly give us cause for concern. In part, these anxieties
should be at the aesthetic level: what does it say for our culture that we
have to centre the importance of an adaptation on the contemporary
issues that we feel should set the viewers’ agenda? How do we deal with
the idea of difference and ensure that we do not collapse the Victorian

into ‘the past’ as a whole and thus undermine the very historical
distance which gives meaning to our re-interpretations and adaptive
modes? These concerns must be raised at a wider cultural and social
level: what does the way we adapt now indicate about postmodernism
and neo-Victorianism as one of its prominent aspects? What does the

backward turn mean for our contemporary culture? And does all of this
signal that, unlike the Victorians, we are not able to look backward and
think forward at the same time?
This book began with reference to work published in the New Scientist
magazine at the start of 2009 suggesting that the Victorians’ sense of
social cohesion, moral purpose, and ontological reasoning were all con-
nected to ‘Victorianism’ in literature and culture. What connects us now
is the ‘neo-Victorian’: a self-conscious reflection on the possibilities,
negativities, revisionary capacity, and belatedness that underline our
relationship to that period. Modernity and postmodernity are brought
together within and because of a series of historical conflicts, differences,
unities and collective cultural experiences. As we write this, adaptations
of the Victorian legacy into a neo-Victorian present are going on all
around us. In the bicentennial year of the birth of Darwin, Tennyson,
and Gladstone, and the sesquicentennial year of Darwin’s On the Origin
of Species and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, it is inevitable that our
thoughts return to the nineteenth century; the 2012 Olympic year will
also mark the celebrations of Dickens’s bicentenary and it will be inter-
esting and informative to see how the Cultural Olympiad will negotiate
a sense of forward-looking Britain in a global context while necessarily
paying homage to the dominant figure of Victorianism writ large. Yet
while there is nothing inevitable about our continued engagement with
the intellectual challenge the nineteenth-century figures represent, there
is an undeniable need to pay heed to the fact that what defines neo-
Victorianism resides in the acknowledgement that we must recognize
the Victorian past in order to engage with the contemporary present.

Notes
Introduction: Neo-Victorianism and Post-Authenticity

1 Ian Sample, ‘Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say
psychologists’, The Guardian, 14 January 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/
science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism. See also John
Sutherland, ‘Believing in 19th century novels’, The Guardian, 14 January
2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/14/literature-
evolutionary-advantage-university-missouri (both sources accessed 3 October
2009): ‘An article in the New Scientist argues that Victorian delusion gave
Britain an evolutionary advantage. The authors have done a multi-factor
analysis on characters from classic Victorian fiction such as Dorothea Brooke,
Heathcliff and Dorian Gray and uncover the kinds of interlocking ideological
beliefs that create cohesion, collective effort, and self-denial for the greater
good. We read Victorian fiction and are condescending about the death
of Nell – “one would need a heart of stone, etc.” – the “happy ever after
endings”, and promote Flashman, not Tom Brown, as our heroic figure. We
are proudly unVictorian: disabused, but diffident.’
2 Karen Chase, ‘Introduction’ to Karen Chase (ed.), Middlemarch in the Twenty-first
Century (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 3.
3 Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 November 1919,
repr. in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 213.
4 Henry James, Preface to Vol. 7 of the New York edition of The Tragic Muse
(1908), http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/text07.htm (accessed 29
September 2009).
5 Zadie Smith, ‘The book of revelations’, The Guardian, 24 May 2008,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/24/classics.zadiesmith (accessed
3 October 2009). Smith here refers to James’s complaint that Middlemarch
was written with ‘too much refinement and too little breadth’, see Henry
James, ‘Middlemarch’ (1873), repr. in section entitled ‘Novels by Eliot, Hardy
and Flaubert’ in Stephen Regan (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century Novel (London:
Routledge, Open University, 2001), p. 81.
6 James, ‘Middlemarch’, p. 85.
7 Smith, ‘The book of revelations’.
8 Hugh Kingsmill, ‘1932 and the Victorians’, English Review, 9 (1932), p. 684,
quoted in Stefan Collini, ‘“The Great Age”: The Idealizing of Victorian
Culture’, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford: OUP, 2008),
p. 211. See also Robert MacFarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in
Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2007), p. 15.
9 Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (New York: OUP, 1973) posits that
poetic creativity is driven by an anxiety about the poet’s relationship
to precursor poets, and that one way of overcoming such anxiety and
asserting individuality is actively to misread or revision the work of earlier
figures.
246

Notes 247
10 Notwithstanding modernist antipathy to the Victorians and Virginia Woolf’s

pinpointing of 1910 as the turning point from old to new world aestheti-
cism, twentieth-century criticism traced the beginnings of modernism back
to the Victorians: Malcolm Bradbury and James MacFarlane’s modernism
covers the period 1890–1930, and Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman
and Olga Taxidou’s (eds) Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998) reproduces texts from the mid-nineteenth
century. See Bradbury and McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’,
in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to
European Literature 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 19–55.
11 Smith, ‘The book of revelations’.
12 See, for example, F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1948) and Raymond Williams’s Reading and Criticism (London:
Miller, 1950) and Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1958).
13 See Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), specifically
chapters 1 and 2.
14 Cora Kaplan, ‘Perspective: Fingersmith’s Coda: Feminism and Victorian
Studies’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13:1 (2008), p. 53.
15 For the different terminologies see Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Natural History: The
Retro-Victorian Novel’, in Elinor S. Shaffer (ed.), The Third Culture: Literature and
Science (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 253–68; Mariaconcetta Costantini, ‘“Faux-
Victorian Melodrama” in the New Millennium: The Case of Sarah Waters’,
Critical Survey, 18:1 (2006), pp. 17–39; Andrea Kirchknopf, ‘(Re)Workings of
Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology, Contexts’, Neo-Victorian
Studies, 1:1 (2008), pp. 53–80, http//www.neovictorianstudies.com
16 Neo-Victorian Studies: see www.neovictorianstudies.com
17 Penny Gay, Judith Johnston and Catherine Waters (eds), Victorian Turns,
NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture (Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2008), pp. 10–11.
18 See Robin Gilmour, ‘Using the Victorians: the Victorian Age in Contemporary
Fiction’, in Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (eds), Rereading Victorian Fiction
(Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 190. Gilmour cites
the standard historical novel (‘modern perspective and . . . modern idiom’);
‘pastiche and parody’; ideological ‘inversion’; ‘subversion of Victorian fic-
tional norms’; ‘reworking or completing of a classic’ and the ‘research novel’.
As the present study shows, such modes have continued since the start of the
millennium and Gilmour’s essay and have been enhanced and modified as
neo-Victorianism has developed conceptually and theoretically.
19 Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the
Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 66.
20 [Miriam Elizabeth Burstein], ‘The Little Professor: Things Victorian and
Academic’, ‘Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels’, 15 March 2006, http://
littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2006/03/rules_for_writi.html
(accessed 12 August 2008).
21 Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism, p. 7.
22 Nora Hague’s Letters from an Age of Reason (London: Simon and Schuster,
2001) may serve as an entertaining case in point. Hague’s heroine discovers
orgasm by reading a sexually-explicit discussion of Henry Maudsley’s (an apt

248 Notes
reflection of the libidinal qualities of reading the novel seeks to produce);

later she launches into her first heterosexual relationship, with a fugitive
American slave, with remarkable equanimity. But pleasure is not the only
sensation with which to assuage modern readers’ desire for the Victorian
experience: the heroine is subsequently confined to a lunatic asylum by
her parents, who are outraged about her cross-race relationship and can

only deem her mad; she consequently suffers nightly sexual assault at the
hands of the attendants. Fortunately a rescue party is organized by her
feminist, socialist, and other politically progressive friends, and the lovers
are reunited. While Hague researched some aspects of the period (but fails
to create believable characters), Faye L. Boothe’s Cover the Mirrors (London:
Pan, 2007) has no such pretensions: it is, blandly, a bodice ripper about sex,
with spiritualism thrown in on the margins to tick a second box.
23 While the modernists themselves and even more immediately after the
Victorians authors like Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells can be seen to use
literature as a comment on, engagement with, or subversion of their Victorian
precursors, we are taking the more recognizable version of the neo-Victorian
to start from the mid-1960s onwards for the purposes of this book. For a
useful summary of the ‘Age of Austerity’ as the period in which the neo-
Victorian developed see Sarah Gamble, ‘“You cannot impersonate what you
are”: Questions of Authenticity in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, LIT: Literature
Interpretation Theory, 20:1–2 (2009), pp. 126–40, specifically pp. 126–9.
24 See Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, ‘Choosing one’s heritage’, in
For what tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004),
pp. 1–19. For a recent discussion of these ideas within Derrida’s theories see
Rosalyn Diprose, ‘Derrida and the Extraordinary Responsibility of Inheriting
the Future-to-Come’, Social Semiotics, 16:3 (2006), pp. 435–47.
25 One might take the perpetually reinvented version of the BBC costume drama
as a signifier of the endurance of the Victorian – and the longer nineteenth
century – within the adaptive sphere, particularly the way in which a post-
millennial return to the scenes of earlier Dickens and Austen adaptations has
sought to refashion the genre for a new generation. For a discussion of these
themes see Chapter 6.
26 The debate between reading this period as nineteenth century rather than
Victorian has recently been summarized in Martin Hewitt, ‘Why the Notion of
Victorian Britain Does Make Sense’, Victorian Studies, 48:3 (2006), pp. 395–438.
Hewitt’s article is a response to various other scholars who have raised ques-
tions about the ‘Victorian’ issue. For the purposes of this book and indeed
for our classification of the genre as a whole, ‘neo-Victorian’ works far better
(if only in terms of catchiness) than ‘neo-nineteenth century’, although there
is necessarily some slippage between the two periods in recent fiction.
27 Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
28 Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist
Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
29 Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to
the Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
30 Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens, OH: Ohio UP,
2007).

Notes 249
31 Christine L. Krueger (ed.), Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time

(Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2002).
32 Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
UP, 2007).
33 This is particularly noticeable in a frequent return to the work of John
Fowles even in recent criticism: see, for example, Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘The

French Lieutenant’s Woman: Goodbye to All That’ in Gay, Johnston and Waters,
Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns, pp. 205–14, Lisa Fletcher’s two Fowles
chapters in Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 195–236, and Peter Preston, ‘Victorianism
in Recent Victorian Fiction’, in Marija Knezevic and Aleksandra Nikcevic-
Batricevic (eds), History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 91–109. A notably
more diverse and multi-genre approach is taken in Rebecca Munford and
Paul Young’s double special issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory on the
theme of Neo-Victorianism, 20:1–2 (2009).
34 David Andress, ‘Truth, Ethics and Imagination: Thoughts of the Purpose of
History’, in John Arnold, Kate Davies and Simon Ditchfield (eds), History
and Heritage: Consuming the Past in Contemporary Culture (Shaftesbury, Dorset:
Donhead, 1998), p. 240.
35 Kenneth Womack, Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 6, p. 8.
36 Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London: Profile Books, 2002), p. 147.
37 Jonathan Clark, Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History
(London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 3.
38 Peter Widdowson, ‘“Writing back”: contemporary re-visionary fiction’,
Textual Practice, 20:3 (2006), p. 492.
39 Michel Faber, The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories (Edinburgh: Canongate,
2006), p. xii. Further references appear in the text. It might of course be pos-
sible that the reader too is fictional here.
40 For further attention to this topic see also the discussion of The Thirteenth
Tale in Chapter 1.
41 Mandler, History and National Life, p. 23.
42 Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997), pp. 30–1.
43 Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002),
p. 3. Further references appear in the text.
44 Susan Barrett, Fixing Shadows (London: Review, 2005), p. 372.
45 David Lodge, Nice Work (1988; London: Penguin, 1989), p. 83.
46 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 128.
47 Ibid, p. 19.
48 Kaplan, Victoriana, p. 106.
49 A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Chatto & Windus,
2000), p. 11.
50 See Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism.
51 James’s text actually reads: ‘“Remember, if you please,” said my friend,
looking at me over his spectacles, “that I am a Victorian by birth and
education, and that the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected
to bear Victorian fruit. Further, remember that an immense quantity of
clever and thoughtful Rubbish is now being written about the Victorian

250 Notes
age.”’ M.R. James, ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’, Collected Ghost Stories (Ware,

Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), p. 281.
52 The statement is usually translated as ‘beneath the signs there lay some-
thing of a quite different kind’: see Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans.
Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin, D.J. Enright (London: Random House,
1993), p. 273.

53 D.J. Taylor, Kept: A Victorian Mystery (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), p. 41.
55 Jonathan Dee, ‘The Reanimators: On the Art of Literary Graverobbing’,
Harper’s Magazine, (June 1999), pp. 76–84.
56 James Harold, ‘Flexing the Imagination’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 61:3 (Summer 2003), p. 247.
57 Ibid, p. 248.
58 Opening sentence of Lytton Strachey’s Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918;
London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), p. vii.
59 Harold, ‘Flexing the Imagination’, p. 250.
60 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 126.
61 James Wilson, The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense (London: Faber and Faber,
2001), p. 472.
62 Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), p. 133.
63 Ibid, p. 145.
65 Ibid, pp. 27–32.
66 Ibid, p. 41.
67 Ibid, p. 124.
68 Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night (London: John Murray, 2006), p. 3.
71 See, for example, Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, ‘Introduction’ to
Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds), Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-
Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),
pp. 1–16.
72 Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Heinemann, 2005), p. 222.
73 Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (London: John Murray, 2007), p. 219. Both McEwan’s
and Jones’s novels were discussed by John Sutherland in his keynote address
at the ‘Neo-Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation’
conference at the University of Exeter in September 2007; parts of this
Introduction were, however, already written for delivery at the conference.
74 Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 1998), p. 302.
1 Memory, Mourning, Misfortune

1 Steven Rose, The Making of Memory (London: Bantam Press, 1992),
pp. 33–4.
2 Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
UP, 2007), p. 14. Kaplan quotes from Freud’s ‘First Lecture’, Five Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis (1909/1910), vol. 11 of The Standard Edition of the Complete

Notes 251
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in

collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson
(London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 16.
3 Freud defines Nachträglichkeit as a belated response to an earlier incident
whose traumatic import is only realized after the event. See Project for
a Scientific Psychology (1895/1950), vol. 1 of The Standard Edition (1966),

pp. 352–6; discussed by Elisabeth Bronfen in The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and
Its Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998), pp. 255–6.
4 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical
Phenomena: Preliminary Communcation’, Studies on Hysteria, trans. and ed.
James and Alix Strachey, assisted by Angela Richards, vol. 3 of The Pelican
Freud Library (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 53–69. First German
edition 1895, first English edition 1955; later extended in Five Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis, pp. 9–55.
5 See Toni Morrison’s Beloved (London: Picador, 1987): ‘If a house burns down,
it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my remem-
ory, but out there, in the world’ (p. 36). As Caroline Rody notes, rememory
‘postulates the interconnectedness of minds, past and present’, thus ‘realizing
the “collective memory”’; ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, “Rememory” and
“A Clamor for a Kiss”’, American Literary History, 7:1 (Spring 1995), p. 101.
6 Sarah Blake, Grange House (New York: Picador, 2000), pp. 204–5. Further
references appear in the text.
7 Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion, 2006), p. 240. Further
8 Wesley Stace, Misfortune (2005; London: Vintage, 2006), p. 357. Further refer-
ences appear in the text.
9 Dolores dies at the cusp of the new century, in 1800, aged five (p. 25); Rose
is born in 1820 (p. 522). Byron’s relationship with his half-sister Augusta
Leigh reputedly culminated in the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth Medora,
in 1814.
10 A.S. Byatt, Possession (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), p. 82. In the novel
Maud Bailey, the feminist scholar specializing in the Victorian woman poet
Christabel La Motte, discovers the hiding place of Christabel’s love letters
to the married fellow poet Randolph Ash when recalling one of her poems
about her dolls.
11 In Ovid’s story the nymph Salmacis watches the beautiful youth
Hermaphroditus take a sea bath and, overcome by irresistible desire, forces
herself on him; in the struggle ‘the two bodies / Melted into a single body /
Seamless as the water’; ‘Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’, in Ted Hughes, Tales
from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses (London: Faber and
Faber, 1997), p. 228.
12 See Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850
(Cambridge: CUP, 1989), pp. 216–8. For ‘The Female Rambling Sailor’ see
also http://folkstream.com/102.html (accessed 10 November 2008). For
real-life eighteenth to early-twentieth-century women who imperson-
ated men see Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who
Dressed as Men in Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora,
1989), and Jo Stanley (ed.), Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the
Ages (London: Pandora, 1995).

252 Notes
13 Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, p. 69, p. 150, p. 152.

14 For Love Hall Tryst’s Songs of Misfortune, produced after the publication of
the novel, and an interview with the author see http://www.puremusic.
com/60lovehall.html (accessed 18 November 2008).
15 Emily Jeremiah, ‘The “I” inside “her”: Queer Narration in Sarah Waters’s
Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace’s Misfortune’, Women, 18:2 (2007), p. 140.

16 Colin Greenland, ‘Skirting the Issues’ [review], The Guardian, 28 May 2005,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/may/28/featuresreviews.guardianre-
view16 (accessed 7 September 2009).
17 The quotation is taken from Blake’s Grange House, p. 356.
18 The text is set in 1896–97, thus contemporaneous with the publication of
Studies on Hysteria (1895).
19 The title quotation is taken from Thirteenth Tale, p. 7.
20 We are told that the fire at Angelfield, and thus the subject-constitution of
Vida Winter, happened sixty years ago, and that she was sixteen at the time.
The reference to the first use of a bicycle (p. 73) during Charlie’s and Isabelle’s
childhood would date this time back to the 1890s (when bicycles came into
vogue), which would point to the first two decades of the new century as
the period during which the Angelfield twins grow up. However, there are
no references to the First World War or other historical events. As Setterfield
indicates in an interview, the decision to blur historical chronologies was
intended: ‘I was certain . . . that it should inhabit an imaginary space poised
between the real and the fictional. I wanted to give it a very deliberately
“bookish” tone, and to place it at one remove . . . from the reality of con-
temporary, everyday life.’ ‘Quality Paperback Book Club: Interview with “13th
Tale” author’ (accessed 20 November 2008), http://thebookblogger.com/
qpb/2007/03/interview_with_13th_tale_autho.html. In the novel Margaret
complains of losing her ‘anchor in time’ (p. 239), which turns Miss Winter’s
Yorkshire home into a version of the enchanted space of Satis House, a place
where Margaret ‘never looked at the clock’ (p. 284).
21 ‘Interview with “13th Tale” author’.
22 As trauma experts argue, memories of extreme experiences become ‘dissoci-
ated from conscious awareness and voluntary control’, creating, in Cathy
Caruth’s words, a ‘double wound’ when fully remembered; ‘fragments of
these unintegrated experiences may later manifest recollections or behav-
ioural reenactments’. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Tauma, Narrative, and
History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), p. 3; Bessel A. van der Kolk
and Onno van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and
the Engraving of Trauma’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in
Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), p. 160.
23 Betwixt and Between echoes Albert Camus’s 1937 collection of essays L’envers
et l’endroit; Hauntings is the title of Vernon Lee’s Gothic short stories of 1890;
Martin Donisthorpe Armstrong is the author of the short story collection The
Puppet Show (1922), which includes metafictional tales on ‘The Author and
the Critics: A Study in Symbolism’ and ‘Biography: A Study in Circumstantial
Evidence’, and in ‘The Uncomfortable Experience of Mr. Perkins and
Mr. Johnson’ engages with the Doppelgänger motif, identity and the uncanny.
Miss Winter’s titles are also adapted from popular music (Jay Bennett’s Twice
is Forever) and film (Jez Butterworth’s 2001 The Birthday Girl). As if to visualize

Notes 253
the metafictional game about reading and writing, Miss Winter’s book titles
are displayed on the hardback cover of Setterfield’s novel; see http://www.
amazon.co.uk/Thirteenth-Tale-Diane-Setterfield/dp/0752875736.
24 This is already signalled in Miss Winter’s extensive and costly range of
Jane Eyre editions: ‘the collection of a fanatic’ (p. 240). Her retreat is set in
Yorkshire moorland. In Angelfield, Hester notices the novel lying around the

house and returns it to the library, only to come across it again in another
location. Jane is reconfigured in Hester (the ‘plain’ governess who falls in
love with her employer, Dr Maudsley, leaves to maintain her independence,
and is later reunited with him after his wife’s death) and in ‘Shadow’ (the
motherless child and poor cousin); Bertha stands model for Angeline; baby
Aurelius, the lost ‘heir’ (Eyre), is wrapped into a page from Jane Eyre. The
vagaries of literary criticism are mocked when Margaret struggles, and fails,
to decipher a symbolic meaning from the page which would shed light on
Aurelius’s origins; later she discovers that it was a random page salvaged by
Shadow during Adeline’s indendiary in the library.
25 When she first visits the ruin of Angelfield, Margaret is immediately struck
by its ‘asymmetrical construction’: ‘The house sat at an awkward angle.
Arriving from the drive, you came upon a corner, and it was not at all clear
which side of the house was the front.’ (pp. 128–9) At the close of the novel,
all the angles are evened out when the new building erected on the site is
made to ‘face straight towards you’ (p. 401).
26 The real-life Henry Maudsley (1835–1918) was not an advocate of girls’
education, arguing in ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’ (1874) for a sex-spe-
cific training geared to women’s biological function as wives and mothers
and warning against subjecting girls to a ‘masculine’ programme of intel-
lectual study on the grounds of its permanently damaging repercussions
on their physical and mental constitution. While the factual Maudsley
invested his efforts in attempting to prevent women from attaining the
professional training that would enable them to compete with male
physicians like himself, Setterfield’s doctor figure proves willing to learn
from and collaborate with Hester and is later shown to have embarked
on a lifelong professional partnership with her. For Maudsley’s article and
repartees by women doctors see Katharina Rowold (ed.), Gender & Science:
Late Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Female Mind and Body (Bristol:
Thoemmes, 1996).
27 Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 57. For trauma
analyses in neo-Victorian literature see Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian
Gutleben (eds), Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).
28 George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 832. The web
metaphor of Eliot’s novel is here applied to the intricate network not of a
wider community but a family: ‘Families are webs. Impossible to touch one
part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one
part without having a sense of the whole’ (Thirteenth Tale, p. 59).
30 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 838.

254 Notes
31 The quotation is taken from John Harwood, The Ghost Writer (2004; London:
Vintage, 2005), p. 294. Further references appear in the text.
32 The Turn of the Screw is central to the construction of Alice ‘Jessell’ in
Harwood’s novel. Three of James’s other ghost stories/novellas serve Viola
Hatherley as inspiration and are mentioned in one of the letters Gerard
finds: ‘The Way It Came’ (1896) provides parallels with ‘The Revenant’ in the

way in which imaginary anxieties become real through obsessive brooding;
‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) with its Spencer Byron who returns to his family
home after a long absence, there to be confronted by the ghost of his alter ego
and to wake up in the lap of his friend Alice Staverton, has resonances with
Gerard’s experience and might even prompt a reading of the ending which
would presume Gerard’s death; in ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895) the com-
mon cause the apparition of a dead lover makes with the protagonist’s worst
enemy has analogies with Alice’s exposure as Anne Hatherley. ‘The Pavilion’,
whose decadent writer Denton Margrave is cast in the role of vampire, draws
on the motif of the draining of lovers’ energies and vitality in James’s The
Sacred Fount (1901), a novel Viola Hatherley debunks as ‘Marie Corelli in
fancy dress’ (Ghost Writer, p. 292).
33 Setterfield, Thirteenth Tale, p. 27.
34 The Yellow Book ran from 1894–97, ceasing publication the year before
Harwood’s Chameleon, which, as Gerard discovers in the British Library, ran
only for that particular year (p. 74), thus resembling The Savoy‘s publication
history (1896). The contributors to the issues he examines include avant-
garde poets, (anti)decadent writers, and illustrators of the fin de siècle.
35 Whether the echo of the titular protagonist of George Moore’s 1921 novella
‘Hugh Monfert’ (In Single Strictness) is intended is unclear. Moore’s Hugh
Monfert also finds himself trapped in a triangular relationship with a sibling
pair, but in this case the dilemma he faces is his homosexual desire for the
brother.
36 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in Victor Sage (ed.), The Gothick
Novel: A Selection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave
Macmillan, 1990), pp. 76–8.
37 Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman
(New York: Columbia UP, 1992), p. 98. First published in Italian in 1977.
38 Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 2.
39 See Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
40 Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Trauma and Experience’, in Caruth, Trauma:
Explorations in Memory, p. 8.
41 ‘Interview with “13th Tale’ author’.
42 Nalbantian, Memory in Literature, p. 81.
2 Race and Empire

1 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ (1981), in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London:
Routledge, 1995), pp. 34–5 (emphases in original).

Notes 255
2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1987), in Patrick

Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 82–3.
3 Edward W. Said, Culture & Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993),
pp. 1–2.
4 Rhys in a 1969 interview, quoted in Elizabeth R. Baer, ‘The Sisterhood of

Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway’, in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch
and Elizabeth Langland (eds), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development
(Hanover: UP of New England, 1983), p. 132.
5 The genre is defined by Ashraf H.A. Rushdy as ‘contemporary novels that
assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice
of the antebellum slave narrative’, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social
Logic of a Literary Form (New York: OUP, 1999), p. 3.
6 For female neo-slave narratives see Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, Courting
Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature (Akron, Ohio:
University of Akron Press, 2007), pp. 55–103.
7 Philip Hensher, The Mulberry Empire (London: Flamingo, 2003), pp. 152–3.
8 Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising
the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke
and Luisa Orza (eds), Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 68.
9 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, p. 194.
10 In Ghosh’s The Ibis Chrestomanthy ‘lascar’ is defined by its indeterminacy
and hydridity. See http://www.ibistrilogy.com/content/pdf/the_ibis_chresto-
mathy.pdf, p. 18 (accessed 14 January 2009).
11 Jabberwock [Jai Arjun Singh], ‘Opium, giant whales and khidmatgars: a
conversation with Amitav Ghosh’, 19 June 2008, http://www.ultrabrown.
com/posts/opium-giant-whales-and-khidmatgars-a-conversation-with-
amitav-ghosh (accessed 14 January 2009).
12 See Ravinder Gargesh, ‘South Asian Englishes’, in Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna
Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson (eds), The Handbook of World Englishes (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006), pp. 90–116.
13 Ghosh in Jabberwock, ‘Opium’.
14 Ghosh, Ibis Chrestomathy, p. 1.
15 Ibid., p. 2.
16 Ghosh in Jabberwock, ‘Opium’ (emphasis in original).
17 Ibid.
18 Amitav Gosh, Sea of Poppies (London: John Murray, 2008), p. 45. Further
19 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Difference’ (1988), in
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies Reader, p. 209 (emphasis
in original).
20 J.P. Mittal, History of Ancient India: A New Version (New Delhi: Atlantic,
2006), p. 173.
22 Laura Fish, Strange Music: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 111.
Further references appear in the text.
23 Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (1999; London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 96.

256 Notes
24 For the historical context see Frederik Wakeman, ‘The Canton Trade
and the Opium War’, in John K. Fairbank (ed.), Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911,
Part I, vol. 10 of The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: CUP, 1978),
pp. 173–4; and Jean Chesneaux, Marianne Bastid, and Marie-Claire Bergère,
China from the Opium Wars to the 1911 Revolution, trans. Anne Destenay
(New York: Pantheon, 1976).

25 A heroic figure in The Mahabharata who marries five brothers; see John
Dowson, A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography,
History, and Literature (London: Trübner, 1879), pp. 94–7.
27 Ibid.
28 Said, Culture & Imperialism, p. xxx.
29 Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1971), p. 79.
30 The Barrett’s Jamaican plantation labourers at Cinnamon Hill were paid
‘two bits or sixpence’, as compared with the more usual ‘four bits or a
shilling’, but faced with labour unrest and the Baptist and Presbyterian
ministers’ support for fairer wages, Sam Barrett conceded the point. See
Jeannette Marks, The Family of the Barrett: A Colonial Romance (1938;
Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), p. 463, p. 466.
31 Ibid., p. 642.
32 The real-life Sam(uel Moulton) Barrett caused some concern for the
Presbyterian minister, Hope Masterton Waddell, about his wage policy at
Cinnamon Hill. Waddell was also asked by a black member of his church
to intervene in Sam’s seduction of his daughter Mary Ann, who had been
given a necklace and earrings; he advised the father to shame the master
by publicly crushing the trinkets. Mary Ann’s age and the nature of their
relationship are uncertain. Sam resented Waddell’s interference and in
1838 upheld his uncle Samuel Barrett Moulton Barrett’s earlier exclusion
of the minister from Cinnamon Hill, but agreed to a reconciliation in
1840, and after contracting yellow fever asked to be given the last sacra-
ment. Ibid., pp. 456–7, pp. 480–93; R.A. Barrett, The Barretts of Jamaica:
The Family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Armstrong Browning Library of
Baylor University, The Browning Society: Wedgestone Press, 2000), p. 95;
Julia Markus, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert
Browning (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 94.
33 Some of Barrett Browning’s real-life correspondence is presented in the novel
not in epistolary form but, with slight alterations, as Elizabeth’s thoughts,
such as the passage on the Emancipation Bill and its consequences for
Jamaican planter society on p. 23; see her letter to Mrs Martin, 27 May
1833, quoted in Barrett, The Barretts of Jamaica, p. 89. In our subsequent
discussion ‘Elizabeth’ refers to Fish’s character and ‘Barrett Browning’ to the
writer.
34 In her Acknowledgements Fish includes Philip Kelly and Ronald Hudson
(eds), Diary of EBB: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
1831–1832 (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1969) among her inspirations for Barrett
Browning’s writing style.
35 Laura Fish, ‘Strange Music: Engaging Imaginatively with the Family of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning from a Creole and Black Woman’s Perspective’,

Notes 257
Victorian Poetry, 44:4 (Winter 2006), p. 507. The novel closely follows the
biographical sources indicated in the Acknowledgements.
36 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ (1856
version), repr. in Fish, Strange Music, Stanza XVI, p. 210.
37 Ibid., Stanza XXVI, p. 212.
38 Markus, Dared and Done, p. 92.

39 Marjorie Stone, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians: “The
Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society,
and Abolitionist Discourse in the Liberty Bell’, in Alison Chapman (ed.),
Victorian Women Poets (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer/The English Association,
2003), p. 34, p. 39.
40 Friday, 10 January 1845, in Daniel Karlin (ed.), Robert Browning and
Elizabeth Barrett: The Courtship Correspondence 1845–1846. A Selection (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 1.
41 Easton Lee, ‘Strategy’, From Behind the Counter: Poems from a rural Jamaican
experience (1996; Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998), pp. 130–1,
Stanza 3, lines 10–11, 14–15.
42 Samuel Barrett Moulton Barrett bequeathed his servant Rebecca Laslie
£100, but tied the legacy to a clause which made the payment subject to
the executors’ (his brother Edward and nephew Sam’s) arbitrary decision
(‘such Legacy shall only be payable in case my Executors shall consider her
conduct and attention during my illness shall have merited such a Mark
of my approval’); see Marks, Family of the Barrett, pp. 460–1, and Barrett,
The Barretts of Jamaica, p. 97.
43 Fish, ‘Engaging Imaginatively’, p. 509.
44 Ibid., pp. 509–10.
45 Elizabeth’s comment in the novel, ‘I live as a blind poet, only inwardly’,
is adapted from a letter to Browning of March 1845: ‘I have lived only
inwardly, – or with sorrow, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my
illness, I was secluded still . . . I am, in a manner, as a blind poet’, in Karlin,
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, p. 34.
46 Elizabeth Barrett inherited £8000 from her Jamaican Uncle Samuel and her
grandmother Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett; Markus, Dared and Done,
pp. 93–4.
47 Ibid., p. 112. Similarly, Barrett Browning was to extol the cross-class friend-
ship between mistress and maid in Aurora Leigh, attacking the exploitation of
working-class women by upper-class ladies, and yet treat her own servant
Elizabeth Wilson shabbily, denying her a wage rise after ten years of service –
one is reminded of Sam’s underpayment of the Jamaican ‘apprentices’ – and
forcing her to choose between her children and her continued employ-
ment with the Brownings. See Margaret Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1988), pp. 272–3, pp. 315–16.
49 Ibid., pp. 106–7.
50 Joseph Phelan, ‘Ethnology and Biography: The Case of the Brownings’,
Biography, 26:2 (Spring 2003), pp. 261–82.
51 Markus suggests that Edward Barrett feared that the Barrett blood was
racially tainted (Dared and Done, pp. 105–6).
52 ‘The master’s look’: Barrett Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanza XX, p. 211.

258 Notes

54 Barrett Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanza IV, p. 207.
55 ‘They dragged him – where I crawled to touch / His blood’s mark in the
dust’, ibid., Stanza XII, p. 209.
56 Ibid., Stanza XIV, p. 209. The first line of the stanza (‘Grief seemed too good
for such as I’) is here rendered in its original 1846/8 version (Stanza XV),

‘Mere grief’s too good for such as I’; see The Victorian Age, ed. Carol T. Christ
and Catherine Robson, vol. E of The Norton Anthology of English Literature,
8th edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 1088.
57 An echo of the first line of Stanza XXXI, p. 213.
58 Barrett Browning referred to her poem as a ‘rather long ballad’; quoted in
Ann Parry, ‘Sexual Exploitation and Freedom: Religion, Race, and Gender
in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”’,
Studies in Browning and his Circle, 16 (1988), p. 120.
59 Stone, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians’, p. 54.
60 Barrett-Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanza I, p. 206.
61 Ibid., Stanzas XXIX, XXXIV, XXXV, pp. 213–14.
62 ‘[M]y black face, my black hand’, ‘I am black, I am black’, ‘we who are
dark, we are dark’, ‘We were black, we were black’, ‘My face is black’; ibid.,
Stanzas III, IV, VI, VIII, XIII, XV, XVI, XXVIII, XXXI, pp. 206–10, p. 213.
63 Ibid., Stanza XXXI, p. 213.
64 Dale Spender, ‘Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’, Women of Ideas &
What Men Have Done to Them (1982; London: Pandora, 1990), pp. 273–9. For
a fictional treatment of the political links between abolitionism and North
American feminism see Marge Piercy’s Sex Wars: A Novel (2005).
65 Barrett Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanzas XXIX and XXXI, p. 213; Stone,
‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians’, p. 52.
66 Susan Brown, ‘“Black and White Slaves”: Discourses of Race and Victorian
Feminism’, in Timothy P. Foley, Lionel Pilkington, Sean Ryder, and Elizabeth
Tilley (eds), Gender and Colonialism (Galway: Galway UP, 1995), p. 129.
67 Stone, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Garrisonians’, pp. 46–53.
68 For a comparison with Beloved see Marjorie Stone, ‘Between Ethics and
Anguish: Feminist Ethics, Feminist Aesthetics, and Representations of
Infanticide in “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and Beloved’, in Dorota
Glowacka and Stephen Boos (eds), Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the
Boundaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 131–58;
Elizabeth H. Battles, ‘Slavery through the Eyes of a Mother: The Runaway Slave
at Pilgrim’s Point’, Studies in Browning and his Circle, 19 (1991), pp. 93–100;
and Tricia Lootens, ‘Publishing and Reading “Our EBB”: Editorial Pedagogy,
Contemporary Culture, and “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”’, Victorian
Poetry, 44:4 (Winter 2006), pp. 499–500. As Barbara Christian notes, there is,
however, a fundamental difference between the female slave who kills her
master’s child, the product of rape, and Sethe, who kills the child she had
with a slave lover; see her ‘Beloved, She’s Ours’, Narrative, 5:1 (1997), p. 42.
69 Ibid., pp. 41–2.
71 Barrett Browning, ‘Runaway Slave’, Stanza XXXIV, p. 214. See also the
graphic description of the child’s earlier struggle for life, Stanzas XVII and XX,
pp. 210–1. In the original 1846/8 version ‘his master’s right’ is rendered

Notes 259
‘the master-right’ (Stanza XVIII), highlighting the child’s embodiment of

the system of slavery (see Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn.,
vol. E, p. 1088).
72 Sarah Brophy, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s
Point” and the Politics of Interpretation’, Victorian Poetry, 36:3 (1998),
pp. 278–80.

73 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 133.
75 It is in Rome, in the opera, that Anna is first able to grieve for her husband,
and that she has her first, unknown, encounter with Layla and Sharif. On
her later trip to the Sinai, she is equally moved by a singer performing in
the desert.
76 Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the
Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984).
77 As Waïl S. Hassan points out in ‘Agency and Translational Literature:
Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, the novel ‘enacts a poetics of translation
on several levels – plot, theme, language, and discourse’, PMLA, 121:3
(2006), p. 757. For a discussion of the novel’s hybridity see Amin Malak,
‘Arab Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of
Ahdaf Soueif’, Alif, 20 (2000), pp. 140–83.
78 The spelling of ‘Omar is rendered as in Soueif’s novel. Kate Pullinger uses
a different spelling for her similarly named character in The Mistress of
Nothing.
79 Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin, 2003). For the central role
of Said’s arguments to Soueif’s novel see Mariadele Boccardi, The Contemporary
British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), pp. 107–8. For the novel’s engagement with postcolonial
theory see Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘Fictionalising Postcolonial Theory: The
Creative Native Informant?’, Critical Survey, 16:2 (2004), p. 43.
80 Ahdaf Soueif, ‘Talking about The Map of Love’, interview with Paula Burnett,
EnterText, 1:3 (2001), p. 98, p. 101, http://arts.brunel.ac.uk/gate/entertext/
issue_3.htm. For the mythical context see Tara D. McDonald, ‘Resurrecting
Iris in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, in Metka Zupancˇicˇ (ed.), Hermes
and Aphrodite Encounters (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2004),
pp. 163–70.
81 Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird, Menie Muriel Dowie, Amelia Edwards, Mary
Kingsley among others.
82 Soueif, ‘Talking about The Map of Love’, p. 102.
83 Quoted in Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement
in Great Britain (1928; London: Virago, 1988), p. 67.
84 After 1812; see the paintings reproduced and discussed in Ruth Bernard
Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New
Haven: Yale UP, 2000).
85 See the early-twentieth-century French postcards of the Algerian harem
(woman) analysed in Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna
Godzich and Wlad Godzich (1986; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003).
86 John Marlowe, Anglo-Egyptian Relations 1800–1956, 2nd edn. (London:
Frank Cass and Co, 1965), p. 179; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the

260 Notes
Liberal Age 1798–1939 (1962; London: OUP, 1967), p. 201; Peter Mansfield,
The British in Egypt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 172;
M.W. Daly, Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2
of The Cambridge History of Egypt (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 243; Roger
Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: OUP,
2004), p. 346.

87 Owen, Lord Cromer, p. 228.
88 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface for Politicians’, John Bull’s Other Island
and Major Barbara: also How He Lied to her Husband (London: Archibald
Constable & Co, 1907), p. lvi.
89 For the factual letter quoted and discussed in Soueif’s novel (pp. 415–19,
493–4) see Clara Boyle, Boyle of Cairo (Kendal: Titus Wilson and Son, 1965),
pp. 62–4.
90 Ibid., p. 62.
91 Ibid., pp. 62–3; Map of Love, pp. 417–19.
92 Boyle, Boyle of Cairo, p. 63.
93 Indeed, while Daly’s 1998 Modern Egypt underplays the British reprisals
as ‘unarguably . . . inept’ (p. 243), and Owen’s 2004 biography seeks to
exonerate Cromer from responsibility (pp. 336–7), John Marlowe’s Cromer
in Egypt (London: Elek Books, 1970) not only boasts two photographs of
the Denshawai floggings and executions, but makes the extraordinary
claim that Egyptian protest was caused by the British public response to
the event: ‘Left to themselves, it would probably not have occurred to the
nationalist leaders to make very much of an issue about the hanging and
flogging of a few peasants’ (p. 266).
94 Boyle, Boyle of Cairo, p. 62.
95 Soueif, Preface to Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (London:
Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 4.
96 Said, Orientalism, pp. 2–3.
97 See Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt (1865; London: Virago, 1983)
and Last Letters from Egypt (London: n.p., 1875); Charles and Susan M.
Bowles’s A Nile Voyage of Recovery (London: n.p., 1897).
98 See Letters from Egypt, p. 18, p. 288; for the cross-dresser see p. 96.
99 Passages from Anna’s diary are placed in italics in the novel; this and
subsequent emphases are in the original.
100 Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, p. 35, see the opening epigraph to this
chapter.
101 Lady Stanhope’s maid Hester Williams was denied permission to marry her
lover, Hanah Massad, ‘a great favourite with his mistress’, who was promptly
dismissed from her service; Joan Haslip, Lady Hester Stanhope: A Biography
(London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1934), p. 224. Duff Gordon’s maid received
various offers of marriage; see Letters from Egypt, 20 January 1864, p. 108.
102 Katherine Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (London: Tauris,
2007), p. 292.
103 Quoted in Forster, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, p. 302.
104 Duff Gordon countenanced (sexual) slavery and child marriage in her
Egyptian friends and herself had two slaves; when one of these, the Sudanese
girl Zeyneb, started questioning Duff Gordon’s authority, she was hastily
passed on to another family (Letters from Egypt, 9 April and 1 December

Notes 261
1863, pp. 51–2, pp. 82–3). For Victorian travellers’ acquiescence with Middle-
Eastern slavery see Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the
Middle East, 1718–1918, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave
Macmillan, 1995), pp. 146–8.
105 Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon, pp. 293–4.
106 Ibid., pp. 293–6, p. 308.

107 The prohibition enables Pullinger to circumvent the problem of how Sally
would respond to a polygamous marriage. Seclusion in the home would
also have disabled her from working; her idea that she might contribute
to the family economy is at odds with contemporary reality. Duff Gordon
recorded in a letter of 12 May 1863 that Mabrouka, Omar’s first wife,
had only once set foot outside the door of her marital home (Letters from
Egypt, p. 60).
108 We refer to the fictional character as Lucie. Duff Gordon cites many
instances of forced labour, dispossession, gratuitous imprisonment, and
brutal reprisals against the local population. Her letters were intercepted,
and she herself was threatened by an emissary of the Pasha (Frank, Lucie
Duff Gordon, p. 345); in the novel an attempt is made to bribe Omar into
killing her.
109 Kate Pullinger, The Mistress of Nothing (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009), p. 57.
110 Writing to her husband on 3 January 1864 Duff Gordon records sharing
a cabin with Sally and Omar, who slept at their feet; Letters from Egypt,
p. 90.
111 Instead of spending the winter months with her, Alexander Duff Gordon
departed on a hunting expedition with his daughter after the briefest of
visits; Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon, pp. 288–90.
112 Quoted in ibid., p. 294.
113 Catherine Wynne, ‘Navigating the Mezzaterra: Home, Harem and the
Hybrid Family in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, Critical Survey, 18:2
(2006), p. 60.
114 Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 20 January 1864, p. 108; see also 7 February,
pp. 111–12. The reference is to Martineau’s Eastern Life, Present and Past
(London: Edward Moxon, 1848).
115 For a colour reproduction see http://www.orientalist-art.org.uk/lewis39.html
116 For a colour reproduction see http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/
ViewWork?workid=8680
117 Anna’s reference is to Edward William Lane’s 1850 translation of The
Thousand and One Nights. Compare with Duff Gordon: ‘it’s the reverse of all
one’s former life when one sat in England and read of the East. “Und nun
sitz ich mitten drein” [and now I’m right in there] in the real, true Arabian
Nights, and don’t know whether “I be as I suppose I be” or not’, Letters from
Egypt, 10 December 1862, p. 34 (emphasis in original).
118 Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures
of Travel (London: Leicester UP, 1996), pp. 127–8.
119 Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, pp. 1–2.
120 Fawwaz established her feminist reputation with her manifesto article
‘Fair and Equal Treatment’ (1891) and a biographical dictionary of notable
women, Scattered Pearls in the Generations of Secluded Women (1894).

262 Notes
She contributed to Hind Nawfal’s women’s magazine Al-Fatah. Sonia Dabbous,

‘“Till I Become a Minister”: Women’s Rights and Women’s Journalism in
pre-1952 Egypt’, in Naomi Sakr (ed.), Women and Media in the Middle East:
Power Through Self-Expression (London: I.B. Taurus, 2004), p. 41; ‘Fair and
Equal Treatment’ is translated in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (eds),
Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago,

1990), pp. 221–6.
121 Writing under the pseudonym Bahithat Al-Badiya, Malak Hifni Nasif
collected her articles and political speeches in her book Al-Nisa’iyat
(‘Feminist Texts’). She used the Nationalist Congress in Heliopolis in
1911 to proclaim the feminists’ demands. Margot Badran, ‘Egyptian
Feminism in a Nationalist Century’, Mujeres Mediterránneas – Femmes
Mediterranées – Mediteranean Women – Dones Mediterrànies, http://www.
mediterraneas.org/article.php3?id_article=178 (accessed 2 January 2009).
122 Dabbous, ‘Till I Become a Minister’, p. 41; Hind Nawfal, ‘The Dawn of the
Arabic Women’s Press’ (1892), in Badran and Cooke, Opening the Gates,
(pp. 217–19), p. 218.
123 Dabbous, ‘Till I Become a Minister’, pp. 41–2.
124 Inaugurated in 1909, the real-life lecture series at the Egyptian University
included Malak Hifni Nasif among the speakers. See Badran, ‘Egyptian
Feminism in a Nationalist Century’.
125 Dabbous, ‘Till I Become a Minister’, p. 41.
126 Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman: Two Documents
in the History of Egyptian Feminism, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (1992;
Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2000). Amin advocated
women’s education and an end to seclusion as a precondition for national
progress. His condemnation of the ignorant, hyper-sensual wife only
concerned with pleasure and material goods, and strategic references to
women’s maternal role as educators of men and marital function as com-
panions and co-equals drew on arguments similar to those co-opted by
Mary Wollstonecraft and the Victorian women’s movement.
3 Sex and Science

1 Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Introduction’
to Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (London: Routledge,
1990), p. 3.
2 Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist
Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 6.
3 Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising
the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke
and Luisa Orza (eds), Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 67.
5 Michel Foucault, ‘The Repressive Hypothesis’, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1:
The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990),
p. 49.

Notes 263
6 For the Cleveland Street Scandal see Donald Thomas, The Victorian
Underworld (London: John Murray, 1998), p. 102.
7 W.T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6,
7, 8, 10 July 1885.
8 Andrew Davies’s 2002 BBC version of Tipping the Velvet lends enormous
prominence to Waters’s quirky dildo while neglecting her book’s central

symbol, the oyster; in his 2008 ITV adaptation of Affinity Margaret Prior is
implausibly equipped with a fiancé (see our discussion in Chapter 6).
9 Barry has been the subject of a number of biographies, most recently Rachel
Holmes’s Scanty Particulars: The Mysterious, Astonishing and Remarkable Life
of Victorian Surgeon James Barry (London: Penguin, 2002).
10 Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Vintage, 1984), p. 7.
11 Engaging with aspects of both genres, Hottentot Venus explodes the categories
of the neo-slave narrative and the neo-Victorian novel. For details of the
former see Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic
of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), and Judith Misrahi-Barak
(ed.), Revisiting Slave Narratives: Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves
(Université Montpellier III: Coll. ‘Les Carnets du Cerpac’ no. 2, 2005).
12 Emily Martin, ‘Science and Women’s Bodies: Forms of Anthropological
Knowledge’, in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth, Body/Politics, pp. 69–82.
13 Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern
Science (London: Pandora, 1993), pp. 143–83.
14 Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence (1981; London: Women’s Press,
1988), pp. 8–81.
15 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Visual and
Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14–26.
16 Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England,
1815–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002), p. 162.
17 The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first English usage of the term to
1842 (OED online).
18 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, pp. 50–80.
19 Jane M. Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex
(London: Penguin, 1997), p. 179; also Judith Butler, ‘The Force of Fantasy:
Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess’, Differences, 2:2 (Summer
1990), pp. 105–25, and Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural
Theory and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 205–9.
20 Rosemary Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (London:
Routledge 1992), p. 113; also Sarah Gamble (ed.), The Routledge Companion
to Feminism and Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 297.
21 Charlene Y. Senn, ‘The Research on Women and Pornography: The Many
Faces of Harm’, in Diana E.H. Russell (ed.), Making Violence Sexy: Feminist
Views on Pornography (Buckingham: Open UP, 1993), pp. 181–2.
22 Michel Foucault, ‘The Means of Correct Training’ and ‘Complete and
Austere Institutions’, Discipline and Punish, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The
Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 188–224.
23 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin
(Cambridge: CUP, 1997), p. 2.
24 Barry Reay devotes a chapter of his book on Hannah Cullwick and Arthur
Munby (the cross-class relationship parodied in The Observations’ dyad of

264 Notes
mistress and maid) on the semiotics of hands: ‘Dorothy’s Hands: Feminizing

Men’, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian
England (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), pp. 125–42.
25 The term ‘Hottentot’ originates from the Dutch word for stutterer and
referred to the click sounds of Khoi speech, a complex language Dutch settlers
found it difficult to master. See Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus: The Life

and Death of Saartjie Baartman: Born 1789 – Buried 2002 (London: Bloomsbury,
2007), p. 10, and ‘The Heroine’s Note’ in Barbara Chase-Riboud, Hottentot
Venus (2003; New York: Anchor, 2004), n.p. Further references to the novel
appear in the text.
26 The cartoon associates the British obsession with Baartman not only with
sexual prurience but also with cannibalism: while the Scottish soldier on
the right attempts to peep under Saartjie’s apron, blissfully unaware of the
vulnerability to imminent attack of his own buttocks, the female spectator
bends down to get a better view not of Baartman’s but of the other Scotsman’s
privates, who himself can conceive of Baartman only as consumable
victuals.
27 Critical accounts render her names differently. For details see Clifton
Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2009), p. 9, p. 107. To distinguish between the factual per-
sonality and the fictional subject we will use the surname, sometimes in
conjunction with Saartjie, to refer to the real-life woman, and Sarah (some-
times with the surname) when discussing Chase-Riboud’s protagonist.
28 M. G[eorges] Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations Faites sur le Cadavre d’une
femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de VÉNUS HOTTENTOTE’,
Mémoires du Muséum d’Histoire naturelle (Paris: A. Berlin, 1817), pp. 259–74.
29 Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”’, British
Journal for the History of Science, xliii (2004), p. 246.
30 Holmes, Saartje Baartman, pp. 169–83.
31 ‘A Conversation with Jane Harris’, included in the US Penguin’s ‘Book
Clubs/Reading Clubs’ review: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/
us/observations.html (accessed 2 September 2009).
32 The first edition of this enormously popular manual was published in
1859–61; the novel is set in the early 1860s: Jane Harris, The Observations
(London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 112. Further references to the novel
appear in the text.
33 Martin, ‘Science and Women’s Bodies’, p. 69.
34 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1: The London
Street-Folk (1851; London: Frank Cass & Co, 1967), p. iii. Thanks are due to
Allison Neal for drawing our attention to the parallels with Mayhew.
35 Mayhew, London Labour, pp. 1–2.
36 See Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, The
Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, trans. and introduced by Nicole Hahn
Rafter and Mary Gibson (Durham: Duke UP, 2004; published originally as
La donna delinquente in 1893 and first published in English in 1895), Part
III: ‘Pathological Anatomy and Anthropometry of Criminal Woman and
the Prostitute’, pp. 105–56.
37 See W.H. Flower’s ‘Account of the Dissection of a Bushwoman’, Journal of
Anatomy and Physiology, 1 (1867), pp. 189–208.

Notes 265
38 Hannah Cullwick (1833–1909), char-woman, cook, housemaid, and house-

keeper, and Arthur J. Munby (1828–1910), barrister, diarist, minor poet,
amateur photographer and ‘collector’ of working-class women, entertained
a relationship from 1854 until Cullwick’s death in 1909. Prompted by
Munby, Cullwick started to keep a diary recording her working days.
Munby also encouraged Cullwick to read eighteenth-century classics like

Clarissa and to learn French. See Liz Stanley, Introduction to Liz Stanley
(ed.), The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant (London: Virago,
1984), pp. 1–34. For the social, sexual, and racial (master/slave) contexts see
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Context (London: Routledge, 1995); Reay, Watching Hannah; and Diane
Atkinson, Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick
(New York: Macmillan, 2003).
39 In his diary Munby recorded his encounters and conversations with as well
as observations of working women; see Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two
Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby 1828–1910 (London: John
Murray, 1972).
40 Cameron’s (1815–79) late-Victorian photography revolutionized the art;
see Julian Cox and Colin Ford, with contributions by Joanne Lukitsh and
Philippa Wright, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (London:
Thames & Hudson in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum and The
National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, 2003).
41 See Munby’s various photographs of Cullwick, in McClintock, Imperial
Leather, pp. 135–6.
42 Ibid., p. 103.
43 Théaulon, Dartois and Brasier, The Hottentot Venus, or The Hatred of
Frenchwomen, trans. and repr. in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Black Venus:
Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham:
Duke UP, 1999), pp. 127–64. In the play a young Frenchwoman passes
herself off as the Hottentot Venus in order to attract the attention of her
cousin, who is determined only to marry an exotic foreigner.
44 As Deborah A. Thomas argues in ‘Miss Swartz and the Hottentot Venus
Revisited’, Thackeray Newsletter, 36 (1992), pp. 1–5, the illustration entitled
‘Miss Swartz rehearsing for the Drawing Room’ in chapter 21 of Vanity Fair,
in which one of her hands demonstratively points to her large rump empha-
sized by the bustle of her dress, can be read as a reference to Baartman.
45 Carter’s short story problematizes Baudelaire’s ‘Black Venus’ cycle in
which his Creole lover Jeanne Duval is associated with the Hottentot
Venus; see Jill Matus, ‘Blonde, Black and Hottentot Venus: Context and
Critique in Angela Carter’s “Black Venus”’, in Alison Easton (ed.), Angela
Carter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 161–72.
46 Sartje is adopted by the New Woman protagonist Rebekah and integrated
into her family of four white boys when the mixed-raced child is rejected
by her biological parents, Rebekah’s husband and their black servant.
47 See ‘Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman’s head while hav-
ing a full bubble bath’, in which the female speaker puns on the term
‘steatopygous’ and expresses the desire to ‘place [her] foot / on the head
of anthropology’, in Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (London:
Virago, 1984), p. 15.

266 Notes
48 Elizabeth Alexander’s ‘The Venus Hottentot’ also invokes Sylvia Plath in its
celebration of the rage of the abused woman, who fantasizes about rising
from the operating table: ‘I’d spirit / his knives and cut out his black heart, /
seal it with science fluid inside / a bell jar’ for display in a museum; The
Venus Hottentot (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990), pp. 6–7.
49 Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (1990; New York: Theatre Communications

Group, 1997). Parks emphasizes Venus’s self-destructive desires: her love
affair with the ‘Baron Docteur’, a version of Cuvier (originally played by
a black actor) and her self-commodification have provoked controversy;
see Jean Young, ‘The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of
Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, African American Review,
31:4 (Winter 1997), pp. 699–708. Parks engages metadramatically with
the contemporary textual construction of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and her
erotic appeal by incorporating Théaulon, Dartois and Brasier’s Vaudeville
play within the plot when one of the characters impersonates Venus in
order to recapture the waning affections of her fiancé. The threat of a
German doctor in possession of a female ‘Hottentot’ corpse who will beat
him to the publication of the first ever dissection report persuades the
Baron Docteur to hand Venus over to assassins. The objectification and
murder of an early-nineteenth-century black woman is here implicitly
associated with the cultural, scientific, and racial politics that would
lead to the Holocaust of the 1940s. Part of the play is set in Tübingen,
a historic university town in Southern Germany, the alma mater of the
Romantic poets Hölderlin and Mörike, the philosophers Schelling and
Hegel, and the scientists Kepler and Alzheimer. Parks evidently wants her
audience to remember that academic institutions carry their own legacy
of racism.
50 Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story (2000; New York: Feminist Press, 2001), p. 1.
The all-to-easy equation of Baartman with black South Africa is problema-
tized when David’s search for his Griqua (Khoi) roots uncovers his likely
descendancy from Cuvier, while the black female comrade in the liberation
movement whom he helps to victimize is associated with Baartman and
Krotoa, a Khoisan woman employed by Jan Van Riebeck (the seventeenth-
century governor of the Cape), whose interracial marriage to the Danish
surgeon Pieter van Meerhoff was the first of its kind. The narrator’s refusal
to include David’s ‘stories’ of Baartman and Krotoa is a political response
to the claim to ‘speak for’ the two women. The novel has a dual time-line,
the 1880s to 1920s and the early 1990s. See Dorothy Driver’s Afterword
(pp. 215–54), and Kai Easton, ‘Travelling through History, “New” South
African Icons: The Narratives of Saartjie Baartman and Krotoä-Eva in Zoë
Wicomb’s David’s Story’, Kunapipi, 24:1–2 (2002), pp. 237–50.
51 Maria Cristina Nisco, ‘Dark Histories, Bright Revisions: Writing the
Black Female Body’, Nebula, 3:1 (April 2006), pp. 67–70. For other crea-
tive instances of ‘re-membrance’ see Anca Vlasopolos, ‘Venus live! Sarah
Bartmann, the Hottentot Venus, re-membered’, Mosaic, 33:4 (2000),
pp. 128–43.
52 Zola Maseko, The Life and Times of Sara Baartman: ‘The Hottentot Venus’
(Icarus Films, 1999), see http://icarusfilms.com/new99/hottento.html.

Notes 267
53 Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. xiii–xiv. The book provides fascinating
new insights, such as dating Baartman’s birth back to 1777, as opposed to
1789, and gives fuller details of her employment history in Cape Town and
her private circumstances; quantities of missing (or incomplete) references,
however, lend it a semi-fictionalized appearance.
54 Holmes (Saartjie Baartman, p. 118) asserts (without providing a source) that

after Dunlop’s death Hendrik Cesars reconstituted himself as Henry Taylor.
The complexities of the relationship between the three creators of the
‘Hottentot Venus’ are quasi-sentimentalized with the (unreferenced) specu-
lation that Dunlop left his belongings to Baartman and Cesars (p. 115).
55 Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy
of “Hottentot” Women in Europe, 1815–1817’, in Londa Schiebinger (ed.),
Feminism & the Body (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 204, pp. 221–2.
56 Susan B. Iwanisziw, ‘The Shameful Allure of Sycorax and Wowski: Dramatic
Precursors of Sartje, the Hottentot Venus’, Restoration and 18th Century
Theatre Research, 16:2 (2001), p. 3.
57 As Yvette Abrahams points out, ‘steatopygia’ has yet to be defined; see
‘Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Early-Nineteenth-
Century Britain’, in Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri, with the
assistance of Beth McAuley (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender
and Race (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998), pp. 221–2.
58 Fausto-Sterling, ‘Gender, Race, and Nation’, p. 216.
59 These anxieties continue in the twenty-first century with the rise of
labiaplasties: the cosmetic alteration or excision of the labia majora or
minora when considered to be ‘too over-developed’ to suit a female
body beautiful whose primary function is the accessibility of the vagina
(The Perfect Vagina, dir. Heather Leach, Channel 4, 17 August 2008).
See also the Manhattan Center for Vaginal Surgery’s representations of
‘defective’ and ‘corrected’, aesthetically and functionally ‘enhanced’
and ‘rejuvenated’ vulvas, http://www.centerforvaginalsurgery.com/nycla-
biaplasty/labiaplastypictures.htm; for feminist counteractivities see New
View Campaign, http://newviewcampaign.org/default.asp (both sources
accessed 23 September 2009).
60 Lombroso and Ferrero, in Criminal Woman, The Prostitute, and the Normal
Woman, constructed the female criminal – as also the female genius
(p. 84) – through bodily (particularly facial and genital) anomalies (p. 49,
p. 54, pp. 136–8, pp. 141–2), deploying photography as scientific proof of
their claims, and pronouncing female criminals and prostitutes alongside
lesbians, ‘savages’, primates, and children as atavistic. Ultimately, even
the ‘normal’ woman had a ‘natural’ disposition towards deviance. See
David G. Horn, ‘This Norm Which Is not One: Reading the Female Body
in Lombroso’s Anthropology’, in Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (eds),
Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), pp. 109–27.
61 For the conceptual link, in the scientific imagination, between genital
‘abnormalities’, race, and sexual deviance see Jennifer Terry, ‘Anxious
Slippages between “Us” and “Them”: A Brief History of the Scientific Search
for Homosexual Bodies’, in Terry and Urla, Deviant Bodies, pp. 139–48.

268 Notes
62 Some physicians believed that a disposition towards nymphomania could

be detected from the (négroid) ‘animal organization’ of the body such as
‘small eyes, large, broad nose and chin, thick lips, and the disproportion-
ate size of the posterior position of her head’; see John Tompkins Walton,
‘Case of Nymphomania Successfully Treated’, American Journal of Medical
Science, 33:1 (1857), p. 47, quoted in Carol Groneman, ‘Nymphomania:

The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality’, in Terry and Urla, Deviant
Bodies, p. 220.
63 In ‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female
Sexuality’, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) Sander Gilman draws attention to Edouard
Manet’s representation of Emile Zola’s prostitute Nana in L’Assommoir
(1877), which prompted his 1877 painting Nana and in its turn, together
with his earlier Olympia (1863), inspired Zola’s depiction of Nana in his
eponymous novel of 1880 (pp. 104–7); also discussed in Gilman’s Sexuality:
An Illustrated History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989), pp. 287–307.
See Abele De Blasio’s illustration ‘Steatopygia in an Italian prostitute’
(1905) reproduced in Gilman’s books (p. 100; p. 303).
64 Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book’, Diacritics, 17:2 (Summer 1987), p. 67.
65 Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, p. 15.
66 Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 247.
67 To Mrs Francis Smith, Cape Town, Sunday Night, Oct. [1909]), in
S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner (ed.), The Letters of Olive Schreiner 1876–1920
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), p. 290.
68 In his autopsy report Cuvier referred to Baartman as ‘notre Boschismanne’
(‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 264, p. 270, p. 271), a racial categorization
challenged by Johannes Müller in ‘Ueber die äusseren Geschlechtstheile
der Buschmänninen’, Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und Wissenschaftliche
Medicin (1834), p. 324.
69 Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, p. 145, p. 148. For scientific constructions of the
Great Chain of Being in relation to Baartman see also Stephen Jay Gould,
The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (1985; London: Penguin,
1987).
70 See Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press
of Harvard UP, 1978), pp. 273–5.
72 See a contemporary account in Altick, Shows of London (p. 269): ‘He found
her surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her, another
walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; and one lady
employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, “nattral.”’
This scene is reproduced in Chase-Riboud (p. 106).
73 Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 238. For the exhibition of Zulus,
which prompted Dickens to write his essay on ‘The Noble Savage’
(Household Words, 1853), see also Bernth Lindfors, ‘The Hottentot Venus
and other African attractions in nineteenth-century England’, Australasian
Drama Studies, 1 (1983), pp. 90–5.
74 Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 237. Caroline Camancini, the
‘thirty-inch fairy’, one of Sarah’s best friends in Chase-Riboud, is based on

Notes 269
the real-life Miss Crackham, the ‘Sicilian Fairy’ (Qureshi, ibid., pp. 236–7;
see also Altick, Shows of London, pp. 253–87). As Abrahams points out,
‘white freaks were always exhibited as oddities, whose value lay in the
way they were distinguished from the rest of their species. Black people,
on the other hand, were exhibited as typical of their race’ (‘Images of Sara
Bartman’, p. 225).

75 Crais and Scully cite a figure of 5–10,000 (Sara Baartman, p. 67).
76 Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 241; see also our discussion of the
1833 act and its aftermath in Chapter 2.
77 Charles Williams, ‘Prospects of Prosperity’ (1810), repr. in Holmes, Saartjie
Baartman, (unnumbered) plate 9.
78 Baartman’s act consisted in playing the guitar, singing and dancing, thus
blending the freak show with aspects of her earlier career in Cape Town,
where she had been an evening entertainer. Holmes argues that the ‘key to
her popularity was not in the scale of her physical endowments . . . but in
her music, in the way she moved and in her skills as an entertainer’ (Saartjie
Baartman, pp. 34–5, 69–70).
79 See ibid., pp. 76–109, for details of the court case. Some of the depositions
and speeches are reproduced in Chase-Riboud, chapter 11.
81 Ibid., p. 248.
82 Easton, ‘Travelling through History’, pp. 244–5; Holmes, Saartjie Baartman,
p. 171, p. 177, p. 187; Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 149–69.
83 Zoë Wicomb, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’,
in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature,
Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 93.
85 ‘Paris: La Venus Hottentote’, Affiches, annonces et avis divers ou Journal
Général de France, 18 September 1814, p. 15, quoted in Holmes, Saartjie
Baartman, pp. 18–19. The factual Baartman had a lover in Cape Town,
whom she lost under less dramatic circumstances: while in the service of
Cesars, she lived with Hendrik van Jong, a Dutch army drummer working
for a British battalion, and had a child with him. The child died and the
relationship dissolved after Hendrik’s battalion was posted elsewhere. This
was Baartman’s second of three children, all of whom died (Crais and Sully,
Sara Baartman, pp. 46–7).
86 She referred to her four sisters and two brothers in the court case. One
of her brothers rebelled against Cornelius Muller; Crais and Scully, Sara
Baartman, p. 25, p. 100.
87 Ibid., pp. 21–40.
88 Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, p. 25. A degree of racial ambiguity is retained in
the novel when Hendrik Caesar boasts of his Hottentot ancestry, which his
brother hotly denies.
89 Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 54–6.
90 The historical Dunlop died in 1812. In 1814 Baartman was taken to Paris by
Taylor, who increased the length of her daily performances from six to ten
hours, and appears to have sold her to a handler of animals, S. Réaux, who
increased Baartman’s shifts to twelve hours, followed by additional private
performances (Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, pp. 127–31). Crais and Scully

270 Notes
draw attention to a French emigrant with the same surname (Jean Reaux),
who acted as a ballet master in Cape Town’s African Theatre in 1805–11,
speculating whether this might have been the same man as, or a relative
of, Baartman’s later master (pp. 51–3, p. 127).
91 There is no factual record of Baartman ever having married; see Crais and
Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 108–9. They speculate, however, about a fourth

child conceived in England, possibly by Dunlop.
92 The historical Baartman did not appear in court but was interviewed
separately by Zachary Macaulay (who features in the novel) and four other
men; Robert Wedderburn did not contribute to the case (Holmes, Saartjie
Baartman, pp. 101–2).
93 Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 86–9. Abolitionist leaders like
Macaulay had business interests in the Sierra Leone Company and upheld
the apprenticeship system, thus perpetuating slavery.
94 The real-life Baartman remained illiterate (Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, p. 13).
95 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 17.
96 Réaux arranged for Baartman to model for Georges and Frédérik Cuvier,
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Henri de Blainville and other scientists in
the Jardin des Plantes for three days in February 1815. Distressed at being
expected to undress, she resisted all attempts to make her discard the
handkerchief with which she covered what the scientists most desired to
behold. In his dissection report Cuvier was later to represent her forcible
exposure as a pleasure entertained cottequishly: ‘she had the complai-
sance to undress and to allow herself to be painted in the nude’; ‘Extrait
d’Observations’, p. 264 (trans. Heilmann).
97 Griffin, Pornography and Silence, p. 29.
98 See Holmes, Saartjie Bartman, p. 137; for his portrait of Baartman see
p. 145. In Chase-Riboud Nicolas Tiedemann admits to having temporarily
purloined Sarah’s skull; Baartman’s skull did indeed disappear for some
months in 1827 (see Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman’, p. 245).
99 Frederick Tiedemann, ‘On the Brain of a Negro, compared with that of the
European and the Orang-Outang’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London, cxxvi (1836), p. 519, p. 521, pp. 525–6.
100 Henri de Blainville, ‘Sur une femme de la race hottentote’, Bulletin du Société
Philomatique de Paris (1816), p. 189.
101 De Blainville, ‘Sur une femme de la race hottentote’, pp. 184–90;
Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations’, pp. 259–74; Chase-Riboud, Hottentot Venus,
pp. 233–6. Chase-Riboud closely follows parts of de Blainville’s report,
which first engages with Baartman’s personal history and then relates the
specificities of her body to that of the orangutan. The report’s second part
reveals de Blainville’s pornographic obsession and his growing irritation
with Baartman’s refusal to allow him to ‘cartograph’ her body at closer
range: ‘As for the organs of generation, although he feels that it would have
been important to observe them with care, M. de Blainville was unable to
do so sufficiently; here is what he saw’ (p. 187); ‘In the ordinary position . . .
no trace of any pedicle formed by the big labia could be seen . . . but in
certain positions . . . one saw hanging between the thighs a fleshly append-
age of at least a thumb in length, which M. de Blainville supposes with
sufficient probability to have been the nymphae; but he can’t assure us of

Notes 271
this’ (p. 187; compare with Chase-Riboud, p. 235); ‘Her buttocks are really
enormous . . . When touching them, it is easily determined that the great-
est part of their mass is cellufat; they tremble and quiver when this woman
is walking, and when she sits down, they flatten themselves and strongly
project themselves backwards’ (p. 187; see Chase-Riboud, p. 235); ‘The per-
son who exhibited her . . . reports that Saarah has a strongly pronounced

venereal appetite and that, one day, she threw herself forcefully on a man she
desired; but M. de Blainville is somewhat skeptical about this anecdote. . . .
Saarah seems good, gentle and timid, very easy to guide when you please
her, sullen and stubborn in the opposite case. She appeared to have a sense
of modesty, or at least to feel very uncomfortable with exposing herself in
the nude . . . For this reason it was impossible to persuade her to let [her
organs of generation] be examined in any sufficient detail. M. de Blainville
says he has observed in her little steadiness of purpose; one may think she
is quiet, powerfully occupied by something, and suddenly a desire will
spring up in her which she will immediately seek to satisfy. Without being
a choleric, she easily takes to opposing people; thus, she had conceived
for M. de Blainville a kind of hatred, probably because he approached her,
tormenting her further by taking details of her appearance; to the point
where, however much she liked money, she refused what he offered her
with the aim of rendering her more docile’ (p. 189; trans. Heilmann).
102 Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Frédéric Georges Cuvier, Histoire
Naturelle des Mammifères, avec des figures originales coloriées, dessinées d’après
des animaux vivants; publié sous l’autorité de l’Administration du Muséum
d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris 1824–47), vol. 1, facing p. 1 (frontal portrait
by Léon de Wally, 1815, entitled ‘Femme de Race Boschismann’, repr. in
Holmes, Saartjie Baartman, plate 14) and p. 3 (side portrait by Nicolas Huet,
1815, see Holmes, p. 145). In Chase-Riboud Georges Cuvier is credited for
authoring the book, adding another layer to his exploitation of Baartman.
103 Baartman died in late December 1815, officially of smallpox, most probably
from the combined effects of overwork, influenza and bronchitis, possibly
pneumonia, and alcohol abuse. Holmes (Saartjie Baartman, pp. 152–8) sug-
gests that Réaux, who had been approached by Cuvier about the sale of
her body in the event of her death, hastened her demise by encouraging
her drinking habit. Cuvier was granted a special licence to seize and dissect
her body (ibid., p. 155). His report was later reproduced, in abbreviated
version, under the title ‘Femme de Race Boschismanne’, in his brother’s
Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères (pp. 1–7) to provide a commentary to the
lithographs.
104 Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 263 (trans. Heilmann).
105 In 1834 the German scientist Johannes Müller still maintained that
elongated labia were part of the natural anatomy of Khoikhoi women and
that length depended on age; see ‘Ueber die äusseren Geschlechtstheile
der Buschmänninen’, pp. 320–21, pp. 339–40, pp. 343–44. Cuvier had
contested the trope of racial-qua-anatomical difference by emphasiz-
ing that the ‘Hottentot apron’ had been artificially produced by genital
manipulation, and that the practice was authorized by the Pope after
Catholic missionaries found that prohibition interfered with conversion
efforts (‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 267). He also challenged the idea that

272 Notes
indigenous women might have found any enjoyment in the practice:

Baartman was ‘unlikely to have taken pleasure in procuring for herself
an ornament of which she was ashamed and which she took such care to
hide’ (p. 268, trans. Heilmann). See also Richard Burton’s brief account of
West African customs and his ‘Notes on the Dahoman’, Selected Papers on
Anthropology, Travel and Exploration (London: A.M. Philpot, 1924), pp. 122–3.

106 Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 259.
107 Ibid., p. 266; ‘my Venus Hottentot’ is ‘this woman’ in the original, echo-
ing Cuvier’s repeated reference to ‘notre Boschismanne’; there is no direct
address to his fellow scientists.
108 Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, p. 145.
109 Nicholas Hudson, ‘The “Hottentot Venus,” Sexuality, and the Changing
Aesthetics of Race, 1650–1850’, Mosaic, 41:1 (2008), p. 34.
110 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871; London: Penguin, 2004), Part
III, ch. 19, pp. 645–6.
111 Cuvier, ‘Extrait d’Observations’, p. 271, trans. Fausto-Sterling, ‘Gender,
Race, and Nation’, p. 224.
112 Austen was in London during Baartman’s time and visited the exhibits in
Bullock’s Liverpool Museum, wondering whether she herself might not be
a suitable specimen to be placed on display there. See David Nokes, Jane
Austen: Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), pp. 374–5, p. 410.
Baartman performed in Bath in 1811 (Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman,
p. 105). However, there is no indication that Austen saw, or commented on,
her exhibition in either location.
113 See Edward Said, ‘Consolidated Vision’, Culture and Imperialism (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp. 73–229.
114 The concept of the ‘noble savage’ often served to justify colonial exploita-
tion. For Rousseau’s misappropriation of his contemporary Peter Kolb’s
much more benevolent depiction of the African population of Cape
Hope see Andreas Mielke, ‘Contextualising the “Hottentot Venus”’, Acta
Germanica, 25 (1997), pp. 154, 156–7.
115 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 50.
116 Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode, 1967), p. 195.
117 These are the names cited in Belinda Starling’s Afterword to The Journal
of Dora Damage (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 446. Further references
appear in the text.
118 Further members were Edward Vaux Bellamy, Sir Edward Brabooke, Charles
Bradlaugh, Frederick Popham Pike, William Simpson Potter, George Powell,
Henry Ricketts, Simeon Solomon, George Augustus Sala, and E. Villine.
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 51, p. 53, p. 57, p. 58; Frank McLynn, Burton:
Snow upon the Desert (London: John Murray, 1990), p. 240.
119 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraires
(Monaco: Imprimerie Nationale, 1956), vol. 5, 7 April 1862, p. 89.
120 Quoted in Ian Gibson, The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer
Ashbee (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 32.
121 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1964; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1966), p. 37.

Notes 273
122 Agnes Lavy was the bookbinder, and Elisabeth Lavy, according to a family
memoir, became an ‘ardent suffragette’; see Gibson, The Erotomaniac, p. 132,
p. 134.
123 See Gibson, The Erotomaniac, p. 59, p. 65, p. 66; James Pope-Hennessy,
Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth 1851–1885 (London: Constable, 1951),
pp. 157–60.

124 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, pp. 79–80.
125 Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘De Corporis et Libri Fabrica: Review of Belinda
Starling, The Journal of Dora Damage’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn
2008), p. 197; http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/.
126 For the Ladies’ London Emancipation Society see Clare Midgley, Women
Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge,
1992), pp. 180–1. Prominent members also involved in the women’s rights
movement included Frances Power Cobbe, Harriet Martineau, and Harriet
Taylor.
127 For the ‘prurient gaze’ of English abolitionists see Colette Colligan,
‘Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery
and England’s Obscene Print Culture’, in Lisa Z. Sigel (ed.), International
Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography 1800–2000 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005), pp. 67–73.
128 W[illiam] Roberts, Book-Hunter in London: Historical and Other Studies of
Collectors and Collecting (London: Elliot Stock, 1895), p. 228; Gibson, The
Erotomaniac, p. xi.
129 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 19.
130 For subversive uses of female needlework see Roszika Parker’s The Subversive
Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press,
1984); for examples of embroidered book covers see p. 73 and Plates 44
and 96.
131 Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth purportedly covered books in this way;
see Maggs Bros Ltd, Bookbinding in the British Isles: Sixteenth to the Twentieth
Century (London: Maggs Bros, 1996), p. 132. According to Charles Southey’s
Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey (1850, quoted from Nixon),
Robert Southey’s daughters (Sara Coleridge, Dora Wordsworth and Edith
May Southey) bound ‘from 1200 to 1400 volumes’ in cotton garments;
for an example from Southey’s ‘Cottonian Library’ see Howard M. Nixon,
Five Centuries of English Bookbinding (London: Scolar Press, 1978), p. 194.
For further examples (including a volume bound by ‘Mrs Wordsworth’)
see the British Library ‘Database of Bookbindings’ (accessed 26 October
2008), http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings/Results.aspx?Search
Type=AlphabeticSearch&ListType=CoverMaterial&Value=117. We are grate-
ful to Dennis Low, Crystal Lake, and other NASSR scholars for guiding us
towards these sources.
132 Mary Reynold’s (1890–1977) inventive bindings included a split kid glove
for Paul Éluard and Man Ray’s Les Mains libres (1937), a thermometer
for Raymond Queneau’s Un Rude hiver (1939), typewriter paper for Jean
Cocteau’s La Machine à écrire (1941), a corset stay for Alfred Jarry’s Le
Surmâle (1945), and a pottery cup handle in the shape of a serpent for
Queneau’s Saint Glinglin (1948). See Hugh Edwards (comp.), ‘Books Bound
by Mary Reynolds’, Surrealism & its Affinities: The Mary Reynolds Collection

274 Notes
(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1973), pp. 82–103. For images see Susan
Glover Godlewski, ‘Book Bindings by Mary Reynolds: A Selection’, Chicago
Institute of Art, http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/bindings/index.php and her
‘Warm Ashes: The Life and Career of Mary Reynolds’, Mary Reynolds and
the Spirit of Surrealism, Museum Studies, 22:2 (1996), pp. 102–29, available
online from the Chicago Institute of Art, http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/

essays/godlewski4.php (both sources accessed 16 October 2008).
133 Kohlke, ‘De Corporis et Libri Fabrica’, p. 196.
134 Ellic Howe and John Child, The Society of London Bookbinders 1780–1951
(London: Sylvan Press, 1952), pp. 208–10, p. 219.
135 While camped on the Red Sea in 1855, Burton’s trek was attacked by Somali
warriors and a spear pierced his cheek; he retained a visible scar; Brodie, The
Devil Drives, p. 123, p. 126. Starling cites Brodie in her Afterword (p. 448
n. 1) and evidently drew on Brodie in her depiction of Knightley.
136 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture,
1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 75–8. Isaac Baker Brown, expelled
from the Obstetrical Society in 1867, mutilated girls from age ten to mar-
ried women seeking relief from the newly implemented divorce act in the
period 1859–1866; the novel is set in the years 1859–60.
137 Brodie, The Devil Drives, p. 286. For further details on the information in
this paragraph see pp. 88–91, pp. 194–95, pp. 208–9, p. 296.
138 For a conceptualization of neo-Victorian bio-fiction see Cora Kaplan,
Victoriana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), pp. 37–84. Further fictional
recreations of Burton are presented in Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire
(2003) in the adventurer Alexander Burnes, and in Iliya Troyanov’s The
Collector of Worlds, trans. William Hobson (London: Faber and Faber, 2008).
Troyanov explores the dichotomy between the ‘real’ man (curious, intrepid,
genial, but always of a kindness unparalleled by others) and his mask of
the cynic capable of violence and murder, as mediated by the voices and
perspectives of his Indian and Arabic-African servants: ‘I didn’t think he
was a terrible man: it was the man he pretended to be that terrified me’
(p. 384). This echoes Brodie’s assessment that Burton’s ‘inhumanity was
more pretended than real’ (The Devil Drives, p. 244).
139 Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 32.
140 For a discussion of Anatomical Venuses see Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual
Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and
Twentieth Centuries (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 44–7;
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle
(London: Bloomsbury, 1991), pp. 128–9; Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead
Body: Death, femininity and the aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992),
pp. 100–1; Warner, Phantasmagoria, pp. 31–6.
141 From the mid-nineteenth century bookbinders started imprinting their
acronyms on their designs; Ruari McLean, Victorian Publishers’ Book-Bindings
in Cloth and Leather (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1974), pp. 13–14.
However, as a female bookbinder, and a woman working for the sex trade,
Dora cannot leave her mark but instead becomes a ‘marked’ woman.
142 Starling here engages with Thomas Carlyle’s satirical book about the sym-
bolic nature of clothes, Sartor Resartus, first published in Fraser’s Magazine
(1833–34).

Notes 275
143 In Chopin’s story a young Louisiana mother, an orphan of uncertain

provenance, is abandoned by her husband after giving birth to a dark-
skinned child. After her suicide he discovers that his mother was of mixed
race; the child reflects his own heritage. See ‘The Father of Désirée’s Baby’
(Désirée’s Baby’), in Kate Chopin: The Awakening and Other Stories, ed. Pamela
Knights (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 193–8.

144 See Marcus, The Other Victorians, pp. 197–216.
145 Starling’s grammatical error (‘le peau’) may derive from her use of Brodie, in
whose biography the Goncourt brothers’ journal entry recording Hankey’s
desire for a young girl’s hide is rendered incorrectly (The Devil Drives,
p. 196).
146 The real-life founder, in 1874, of the Society (not, as in Starling, Union)
of Women Employed in Bookbinding was Mrs Paterson; Peter Gordon and
David Doughan, Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations, 1825–1960
(London: Woburn Press, 2001), p. 185.
147 In Waters’s Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2003), too, books and bindings
are associated with the female body and human hides (p. 209). Maud
comments on her entrapment (and Sue’s), saying that ‘the habits and
the fabrics that bind me will, soon, bind her. Bind her, like morocco or
like calf. . . . I have grown used to thinking of myself as a sort of book’
(pp. 250–1). Unlike Knightley, however, Mr Lilly has no personal sexual
interest in the business, which he pursues with clinical precision and
detachment.
148 See Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (ed.), Black Victorians: Black Victoriana
(New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003), in particular Figures 8, 17, 29.
149 See Hélène Cixous’s manifesto for écriture feminine, ‘The Laugh of the
Medusa’ (1976), in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French
Feminisms: An Anthology (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), pp. 245–64,
especially p. 246.
150 Starling references this quotation to Brodie’s The Devil Drives, but this
particular version derives from Pope-Hennessy’s Flight of Youth, p. 119. The
Goncourt brothers (Journal, vol. 5, pp. 92–3) record in their diary for 7 April
1862 that Hankey was hoping to receive the tanned skin from the thighs of
two women or, preferably, the skin of a young girl stripped from the living
body: ‘la peau sur une jeune fille vivante . . . mon ami [Burton] . . . m’a
promis de me prendre une peau, comme ça, pendant la vie’.
151 Houghton Commonplace Books, Trinity College, Cambridge, quoted in
Gibson, The Erotomaniac, p. 31.
152 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 80.
153 Stuart Jeffries, ‘The Naked and the Dead’, Guardian online, 19 March 2002,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/mar/19/arts.highereducation
154 In Bürger’s poem the titular heroine bemoans the failure of her fiancé to
return from the battlefield; her death wish recalls Wilhelm, whose spectre
arrives on a ghostly horse to reclaim her. The poem ends with the couple
galloping away, illustrating the line repeated five times that ‘Die Toten reiten
schnell’ (‘The dead ride fast’). See ‘Lenore’, Gedichte von Gottfried August Bürger
(Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 188[?]), pp. 35–42. In von Hagens’s rider exhibit two
flayed corpses sit astride a ghostly horse which is rearing upwards towards

276 Notes
the spectator; see ‘Selected exhibits from Body Worlds, the anatomical
exhibition of real human bodies’, exhibit 1, Guardian online, http://www.
guardian.co.uk/gall/0,,669680,00.html (accessed 13 August 2008).
155 ‘Lenore’ (1831), Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977), pp. 611–12.
156 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, ibid., p. 557.

157 The official Body Worlds website – http://www.koerperwelten.com/en.html –
is a model of consumer commodification: a ‘Prelude’ on ‘The Human Saga’
(a celebration of the exhibition’s decade-long success) leads to details of
forthcoming ‘Exhibitions’, followed by a page on ‘Body Donation’ with a
contact address for (von Hagens’s) Institute for Plastination housed at the
International Body Donor Office, where the interested public may donate
their bodies for future exhibitions. Three further pages offer information
on the plastination process, the inventor (with a hagiographic account of
von Hagens’s ‘life for science’ and political sacrifices for the principle of free
speech) and his institute. The final pages take us to the ‘Store’, where we
can buy Body Worlds mousepads and keyrings, and a ‘Media’ section with
press reports returns the reader thematically to the first page.
158 See Over Her Dead Body.
159 ‘Selected exhibits from Body Worlds’, exhibit 7, Guardian online, http://
www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,,669680,00.html (accessed 13 August 2008).
160 Ibid., exhibit 8, http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,,669680,00.html
161 Jeffries, ‘The Naked and the Dead’. The idea has a long tradition: as Warner
(Phantasmagoria, p. 36) notes, wax models of the human body, entering the
fairground in the late eighteenth century, ‘made knowledge itself a form of
entertainment’.
162 Quoted in Iain Bamforth’s Introduction to The Body in the Library: A Literary
Anthology of Modern Medicine (London, Verso: 2003), p. ix.
4 Spectrality and S(p)ecularity

1 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds (Oxford: OUP), pp. 3–5.
2 A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Chatto & Windus,
2000), p. 151.
3 See our discussion of both these critics’ texts in the Introduction, pp. 9–10.
4 See Gary Day, ‘The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror and Victoriana: Histories,
Fiction, Criticism (review)’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13: 2 (Autumn 2008),
especially p. 311 where Day comments: ‘But the absence of religion from
both books suggests that we do not always use history to express our current
anxieties.’
5 ‘Imagining the Real: Close Encounters Between Fiction and History’, keynote
lecture delivered at the ‘Adapting the Nineteenth Century’ conference,
University of Wales, Lampeter, 22 August 2008. This chapter was already
in draft before Duncker’s paper, but we are grateful to her for the conversa-
tion we had about the possibilities of a ‘neo-Tractarian’ text, and for her
confirmation concerning the perhaps troubling absence of religious crises in
neo-Victorianism arising in part from our post-Christian framework.
6 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, p. 11.

Notes 277
7 Ibid.
8 Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and
Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. x.
9 Ibid, p. ix.
10 Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London:
Routledge, 2004), p. 5.

11 Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers: The Victorians and the Occult (1972;
Stroud: Sutton, 2004), p. 57.
12 Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to
the Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2.
13 A notable recent exception to this critical lack is Rosario Arias and Patricia
Pulham (eds), Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the
Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
14 Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, pp. x–xi.
15 Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost
Writing (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001), p. 6.
16 Sarah Waters, Affinity (1999; London: Virago, 2000), p. 17. Further references
appear in the text.
17 Opening sentence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist
Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (1888), introduction and notes by Gareth
Stedman Jones (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 219.
18 Charles Palliser, The Unburied (London: Phoenix, 1999), pp. 104–5. Further
19 Waters, Affinity, p. 7.
20 For a discussion of the detective elements of Palliser’s story see Catherine
Mari, ‘Desperately Looking for the Truth: The Traps and Trappings of Crime
Fiction in Charles Palliser’s The Unburied’, in François Gallix and Vanessa
Guignery (eds.), Crime Fictions: Subverted Codes and New Structures (Paris:
Paris-Sorbonne UP, 2004), pp. 89–97.
21 Belsey, Culture and the Real, p. 9.
22 Susana Onega, ‘An Obsessive Writer’s Formula: Subtly Vivid, Enigmatically
Engaging, Disturbingly Funny and Cruel. An Interview with Charles Palliser’,
Atlantis, XV:1–2 (May–November 1993), p. 281.
23 Ibid, p. 282.
24 Jem Poster, Courting Shadows (London: Sceptre, 2002), p. 58. Further references
appear in the text.
25 A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009), p. 594.
26 See, for example, James Wilson’s Consolation: A Novel of Mystery (London:
Faber and Faber, 2008), which, like Byatt’s novel, is set during the period
of the children’s literature boom during the late-Victorian and Edwardian
periods; another recent text, Charles Elton’s Mr Toppit (London: Viking,
2009), while not strictly neo-Victorian, exploits the idea of the Victorian /
Edwardian children’s writer and children’s fiction.
27 For a history of the development of the museum and its building see John
Physick, The Victoria and Albert Museum: The History of its Building (Oxford:
Phaidon / Christie’s, 1982). The museum was renamed in 1899.
28 Judith Roof, ‘Display Cases’, in John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (eds),
Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century
(Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 104.

278 Notes
29 Charles Saumarez Smith, ‘Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings’, in Peter Vergo

(ed.), The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), p. 9.
30 George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 264.
31 Byatt, On Histories and Stories, p. 162.
32 Rachel Hore, The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008; London: Pocket Books,
2009), p. 228. Further references appear in the text.

33 See Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853), in Dinah Birch (ed.), John Ruskin:
Selected Writings (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2004), pp. 32–63.
34 Patmore’s poem ‘The Angel of the House’ was originally published in 1854
and then in expanded form in 1862. The term has been widely adopted to
refer to the wifely and motherly ideal represented by a Victorian woman
devoted to her children and submissive to her husband.
35 For a discussion of stained glass and the manufacture of glass for the construc-
tion of the Great Exhibition site, see Nance Fyson, Decorative Glass of the 19th
and early 20th Centuries: A Sourcebook (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles
Books, 1996), especially pp. 19–89. For details of the number of stained glass
exhibitioners see Robert Ellis, Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue
(London: Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851, 1851), especially ‘Class 24:
Glass’, vol. 2, pp. 697–709.
36 See http://www.norfolkstainedglass.co.uk/Glossary/glossary.shtm (accessed
10 September 2009).
37 Byatt, The Children’s Book, p. 245, see our previous discussion.
38 Ruskin, ‘The Lamp of Memory’ (1849), in Birch, John Ruskin, p. 18.
39 John Harwood, The Séance (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 57. Further
40 John Harwood, The Ghost Writer (2004; London: Vintage, 2005), p. 4. Further
41 George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of
the World (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), p. 1.
42 Elijah Farrington and Charles F. Pidgeon, Revelations of a Spirit Medium, or,
Spiritualistic mysteries exposed: a detailed explanation of the methods used by
fraudulent mediums, by A. Medium (St Paul, MN: Farrington & Co, 1891).
43 Hilary M. Schor, ‘Sorting, Morphing, and Mourning: A.S. Byatt Ghostwrites
Victorian Fiction’, in Kucich and Sadoff, Victorian Afterlife, p. 247.
5 Doing It with Mirrors

1 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
(London: Routledge, 1984), p. 2.
2 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (1984;
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 6–7, p. 10.
3 Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Bristol:
Intellect, 2007), p. 114. We are grateful to Tamsin Kilner O’Byrne for drawing
our attention to this book.
4 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic metafiction: “the pastime of past time”’,
A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988; London: Routledge,
1996), pp. 105–23.
5 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic (1878),
quoted in Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 99.

Notes 279
6 For the first use of magic lanterns to create spectral effects see Etienne
Gaspard Robertson’s late-eighteenth-century ‘Fantasmagorie’, discussed in
Mangan, ibid., pp. 123–5, and Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria (Oxford: OUP,
2006), pp. 147–50.
7 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. xix, pp. xvi–xxii.
8 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 12.

9 Ibid., emphasis in original.
10 The earliest use of ‘prestige’ meaning ‘deceits, impostures, delusions, cou-
sening tricks’ dates back to 1656; from 1832 the term could refer to ‘Machines
by which phantasmagoria and oracular prestiges were played off,’ OED 2009
online. In his novel The Prestige (1995; London: Orion, 2004) Christopher
Priest draws on it as a symbol of ‘prestidigitation’ or sleight of hand: ‘Chris
Priest interviewed by Don Iffergrin’ (October 2006), http://myweb.tiscali.
co.uk/christopherpriest/pres_qa.htm (accessed 25 March 2008).
11 The Prestige, dir. Christopher Nolan, screenplay by Jonathan and Christopher
Nolan (Warner Bros Pictures and Touchstone Pictures, 2006), 1:52:54–1:52:56.
12 The title quotation is taken from The Prestige, 0:54–0:56.
13 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, pp. 104–5. This differentiation is contradictory,
given that Robert-Houdin prided himself both on his art of prestidigitation
and his mechanical inventions.
14 Priest, The Prestige, p. 64.
15 Tesla was an eccentric scientist and inventor among whose discoveries is
the principle of alternating current. See ‘Chris Priest interviewed by Don
Iffergrin’. As Nolan states in his ‘Special Features: Director’s Notebook’ (The
Prestige), 1:50–2:13: ‘There is an interesting relationship in the film between
the scientists of the day who were essentially the new magicians . . . and the
way in which magicians . . . co-opted the imagery of science . . . to sell old
tricks in a new way.’
16 For Priest’s (considerably less dramatic) description of the three stages of the
magician’s performance see The Prestige, p. 64; for the pledge, which he calls
‘the Pact of Acquiescent Sorcery’, see pp. 32–4.
17 As Mangan notes, the disappearance and reappearance of objects so central
to conjuring tricks bears resemblance to Freud’s ‘fort’/‘da’ paradigm as dis-
cussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; see Performing Dark Arts, pp. 145–6.
18 ‘The film-maker almost more so than the novelist has a very close relation-
ship with the magician in terms of the way in which we are using the release
of information, what we tell the audience when, the point of view we are
drawing them into . . . we use those techniques to fool them’ (‘Special
Features: Metaphors of Deception’, 14:03–14:22).
19 ‘A good illusion works very much like a novel . . . I was trying to think . . .
if there was a story that could be told . . . so that the various secrets . . . are
unravelled in the way that a magician unravels the secrets of a trick.’ (Priest,
‘Special Features: Metaphors of Deception’, 12:13–12:36). With its Gothic
overkill and Frankensteinian ending Priest’s novel is, however, less effective,
and metatextual, than Nolan’s film.
20 Priest features the ‘original’, the Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo (The
Prestige, p. 36); Burger’s choice of the ‘copy’ (the Chinese-American Chung
Ling Soo) for his adaptation is a further intertextual joke on the doubling of

280 Notes
the magician figure. See Frank Cullen, with Florence Hackman and Donald
McNeilly, Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in
America (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 223–5.
21 Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night (London: John Murray, 2006), p. 1.
22 H. Rider Haggard, She (1887; Oxford: OUP, 1991), p. 5.
23 Kim Newman, ‘The Grand Illusion’, Sight and Sound, 16:12 (2006), p. 16, p. 19.

24 For the brothers’ collaborative approach see Dan Shewman’s interview,
‘Nothing Up Their Sleeves: Christopher and Jonathan Nolan on the Art
of Magic, Murder and The Prestige’, Creative Screenwriting, 13:5 (2006),
pp. 60–5.
25 The Illusionist was premiered on 27 April 2006 (Newport Beach International
Festival), The Prestige on 17 October 2006 (Rome Film Festival and
Hollywood); see the Internet Movie Database information available at http://
www.imdb.com/title/tt0443543/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/
(both accessed 25 March 2008).
26 Priest, The Prestige, p. 116, p. 204.
27 Houdini toured Europe and America with the aim to expose spiritual-
ists, publishing A Magician Among the Spirits (New York: Harper) in 1924.
See Kenneth Silverman, ‘A Magician Among the Spirits’, Chapters 11–16,
Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss (New York: HarperCollins, 1996),
pp. 247–384.
28 Sarah Waters, Affinity (1999; London: Virago, 2000), p. 98. Further references
appear in the text.
29 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern
Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), p. 60.
30 Margaret’s first glance at Selina, through the ‘eye’ of the prison cell’s door,
invokes the artefactual nature of the object of desire: ‘I was sure that I had
seen her likeness, in a saint or an angel in a painting of Crivelli’s’ (p. 27).
See, for example, Carlo Crivelli’s ‘Annunciation with St Emidius’ (1486),
National Gallery, London, http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/crivelli/
annunciation.jpg.html (accessed 29 December 2009). Waters’s reference to
Crivelli is, of course, ironic, given that the trance-like state in which Selina
presents herself, clutching a violet in a shaft of sunlight, serves the purpose
of seducing Margaret and initiating her into her new life as a ‘believer’, thus
making her an agent of Selina’s liberation.
31 For Waters’s intertextual engagement with The Turn of the Screw (1898) see
Ann Heilmann, ‘The Haunting of Henry James: Jealous Ghosts, Affinities,
and The Others’, in Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds), Haunting and
Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), pp. 121–5.
32 Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the
Neo-Victorian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 190–1.
33 Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta. 1876; London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 226.
34 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), in The Turn of the Screw: Henry
James, ed. Peter J. Beidler (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), p. 65.
35 For a brief discussion see M.L. Kohlke, ‘Into History through the Back Door:
The “Past Historic” in Nights at the Circus and Affinity’, Hystorical Fictions:
Metahistory, Metafiction, ed. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, special issue
of Women, 15:2 (2004), p. 157.

Notes 281
36 ‘I knew . . . that, careful as I have been – still and secret and silent as
I have been, in my high room – she [mother] had been watching me, as
Miss Ridley watches [in Millbank Prison], and Miss Haxby.’ (p. 223) For
a discussion of the novel’s panopticism see Mark Llewellyn, ‘“Queer?
I should say it is criminal!”: Sarah Waters’ Affinity’, Journal of Gender Studies,
13:3 (2004), pp. 204–10; Lucie Armitt and Sarah Gamble, ‘The haunted

geometries of Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Textual Practice, 20:1 (2006), pp. 142–9;
and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, Courting Failure: Women and the Law in
Twentieth-Century Literature (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2007),
pp. 48–53.
37 They have been known to blind matrons by sticking knitting needles
through the eye-hole (p. 23).
38 In The Bostonians the Southern lawyer Basil Ransome succeeds in persuad-
ing the spiritualist Verena Tarrant to abandon the feminist hysteric Olive
Chancellor, who is desperately in love with her, for (an inequitable) marriage;
Verena is as much under Basil’s spell and command as Selina is under Ruth’s.
39 For the concept of ‘romantic friendship’ acting as a cover for female same-sex
relationships see Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (London: William
Morrow, 1981).
41 Ibid., pp. 5–6. Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr Y (2006; Edinburgh: Canongate,
2007), n.p. Further references appear in the text.
43 Ibid.
44 Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland (1884; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
45 James Clerk Maxwell, ‘Recollections of Dreamland’ (June 1856, under
‘Occasional Poems’), ‘Lines written under the conviction that it is not
wise to read Mathematics after one’s fire is out’ (10 November 1853, under
‘Serio-Comic Verse’), ‘A Poem in Dynamics’ (19 February 1854, ‘Serio-Comic
Verse’), in Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk
Maxwell, with a Selection from his Correspondence, and Occasional Writings, and
A Sketch of his Contributions to Science (London: Macmillan and Co, 1882),
pp. 599–601, pp. 622–8.
46 Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old and New; Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus
Darwin, and Lamarck, as Compared with that of Charles Darwin (London: A.C.
Fifield, [1879]).
47 Samuel Butler, ‘Nothing Good or Ill, etc.’, in Further Extracts from the Note-
Books of Samuel Butler, ed. A.T. Bartholomew (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934),
p. 31. See Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2: ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but
thinking makes it so.’
48 Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory, with an introduction by Professor
Hartog (London: Jonathan Cape, 1880), p. 176.
49 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), p. 158.
50 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 91.
51 William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of
the Deity. Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), quoted in Mangan,
Performing Dark Arts, p. 91.
52 Butler, Evolution, p. 26.

282 Notes
53 Ibid., p. 31. For a refutation of Paley see pp. 24–33.

54 One of the examples Freud discusses in his 1919 essay on ‘The Uncanny’, in
Victor Sage (ed.), The Gothick Novel: A Selection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke:
Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), is an involuntary, recurrent
return to a place from which one seeks to escape, pp. 83–4.
55 See ‘The Mouse Genome’, Nature, 420:510, 5 December 2002, http://www.

nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6915/full/420510a.html, and The Abbie
Lathrop Collection at the John Staats Library, Jackson Laboratory Cancer
Centre, http://library.jax.org/archives/personal_papers/lathrop.html (both
sources accessed 28 December 2008).
56 Book I (paragraph 5) of Homer’s The Iliad, trans. Samuel Butler (Princeton,
NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1942) contains an appeal to ‘King Apollo . . . of
Sminthe’ (p. 8).
57 The Matrix, dir. and written by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski
(Groucho II Film Partnership, 1999). In the film’s dystopian universe Butler’s
idea of machine dominance has been realized; humans are bred to power
the machines and are kept in perpetual bondage through computer simula-
tion. The name of Thomas’s author, Thomas E. Lumas, has some resonances
with that of the film’s hero, Thomas A. Anderson, whom Ariel replicates in
her ‘redeemer‘ function; Ariel’s mentor figure, Apollo Smintheus, is sugges-
tive of Morpheus; the Starlight men resemble the agents, and Baudrillard’s
Simulation and Simulacra plays a role also in The Matrix.
58 Cellarius [Samuel Butler], ‘Darwin Among the Machines’, The Press, 13 June
1863, repr. in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler: Author of ‘Erewhon’, ed. Henry
Festing Jones (London: A.C. Fifield, 1919), p. 44.
59 In the Preface to Erewhon: Over the Range (1872; London: Jonathan Cape,
1908) Butler refers to ‘The Mechanical Creation’, a revised version of the
piece published in the Reasoner, 1 July 1865, which he adapted for the ‘Book
of the Machines’ chapters (23 and 24) of Erewhon.
60 Butler, Erewhon, p. 247.
61 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), p. 150, p. 149.
62 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 5–6. See our introductory paragraph
on the novel.
63 The Illusionist, dir. and written by Neil Burger (Momentum Pictures, 2006),
1:31:32–1:31:49. Further references appear in the text.
64 Newman, ‘Grand Illusion’, p. 19. For the involvement of real-life magicians
in The Illusionist see ‘Special Features’, 0:31–1:01, 8:37–8:39, 19:17–20:40.
65 The scientist David Brewster explained in lectures published in 1832 how
hovering spectral forms (‘Dr Pepper’s Ghost’) could be produced with
angling sheets of glass placed both below and above stage; see Warner,
Phantasmagoria, pp. 152–3, and Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 125. In
The End of Mr Y (p. 45) Lumas’s protagonist refers to Dr Pepper’s Ghost as
one of the ways in which the fairground doctor produces his illusions, but
like Eisenheim’s professional colleagues he remains mystified as to how
he creates his special effects. See also ‘Special Features’, The Illusionist,
1:05:03–1:05:26.

Notes 283
66 For the equivalent description in Millhauser’s ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ see

The Barnum Museum (1990: London: Phoenix, 1998), pp. 219–20. (Further
references appear in the text.) Here there is only one phantom, which stabs
itself.
67 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, pp. 116–17. For stills see http://dvdtoile.com/
Film.php?id=12290 (accessed 30 December 2009).

69 See also Millhauser, ‘Eisenheim’, p. 218. For a description of Robert-Houdin’s
‘Marvellous Orange Tree’ see Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, p. 104.
70 The precise nature of the death of Crown Prince Rudolf and his young
lover, Mary Vetsera, at Mayerling in January 1889 remains unresolved. See
Brigitte Hamann, Rudolf: Kronprinz und Rebell (Wien, Amalthea Verlag, 1984),
pp. 437–95. Elizabeth (‘Sissi’) was assassinated in 1898.
71 Mary Kinzie, ‘Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven
Millhauser’, Salmagundi, 92 (1991), p. 115.
72 Charles Gregory, entry on Phineas Taylor Barnum in Justin Wistle (ed.),
Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture 1800–1914: A Biographical Dictionary
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 29–31.
73 ‘The story goes’, ‘One version of the story’, ‘Some said . . . others said . . .
Arguments arose’ (p. 216, p. 217, p. 237) are some of the many examples
throughout the text.
74 Pedro Ponce, ‘“a game we no longer understood”: Theatrical Audiences in
the Fiction of Steven Millhauser’, Review of Contemporary Film, 26:1 (2006),
p. 100, p. 101.
75 Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Mémoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author
and Conjuror, Written by Himself, trans. Lascelles Wraxall (1859; London:
T. Werner Laurie, 1942), pp. 49–65. For Torrini’s non-existence see Mangan,
Performing Dark Arts, pp. 113–4, and Silverman, Houdini, p. 271.
77 Ibid., p. 145.
78 Silverman, Houdini, p. 3; for the story of the duel see Ruth Brandon, The Life
and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (London: Mandarin, 1995), p. 8.
79 Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, pp. 154–7.
80 See Burger’s ‘Commentary’, 1:08:23–1:08:38.
81 Ronald Bergan, Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press,
1999), pp. 19–22.
82 See Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, chapter 7, especially pp. 116–8, p. 138.
83 Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of
Reality (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), p. 3.
84 See Baudrillard’s opening quotation to this chapter, Simulacra and Simulation,
p. 10.
6 The Way We Adapt Now

1 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), p. xi.
2 Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio
(Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 124.

284 Notes
3 Andrew Davies’s 2008 BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility started with
a striking echo of Ang Lee’s and Emma Thompson’s 1995 version: as if to
pay homage to the previous adaptors Davies too furnished Austen’s third,
in the original text rather bland and underdeveloped, sister with tomboyish
independence and a spirit of adventure which mark her out as a ‘girl of the
future’; a portent of the late-Victorian New Girl and even perhaps a comic

avatar, in Regency costume, of the contemporary viewer. For Austen adapta-
tions more generally see Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (eds), Jane Austen
in Hollywood, 2nd edn. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Gina
Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald (eds), Jane Austen on Screen (Cambridge:
CUP, 2003); Linda V. Troost, ‘The nineteenth-century novel on film: Jane
Austen’, in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 75–89; and
Claire Harman, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (Edinburgh:
Canongate, 2009), especially the chapter ‘Jane AustenTM’, pp. 243–81.
4 Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, ‘A practical understanding of
literature on screen: two conversations with Andrew Davies’ in Cartmell
and Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, p. 239. See
also Davies’s specific comment that after watching the 1982 TV version of
Bleak House’s death of Jo (the crossing sweeper) ‘I felt I had to rip it off; or
to put it more respectably, offer a kind of homage to the earlier adaptation’
(p. 239).
5 See Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: CUP,
2004), p. 1.
6 Ekchart Voigts-Virchow, ‘Heritage and literature on screen: Heimat and herit-
age’, in Cartmell and Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on
Screen, p. 123.
7 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, p. 1.
8 John Gardiner, ‘Theme-park Victoriana’, in Miles Taylor and Michael
Wolff (eds), The Victorians since 1901: Histories, representations and revisions
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004), p. 167.
9 Colin Sorensen, ‘Theme Parks and Time Machines’, in Peter Vergo (ed.),
The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), p. 66.
10 John Gardiner, The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect (London: Hambledon and
London, 2002), p. 161.
11 Juliet John, ‘Dickens and the Heritage Industry; or, Culture and the Commodity’,
in Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (eds), Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-
Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 157–70.
12 Taken from Dickens World homepage: http://www.dickensworld.co.uk/
(accessed 20 October 2008).
13 See http://www.dickensworld.co.uk/events.php (accessed 13 September 2009).
14 See David Barndollar and Susan Schorn’s ‘Revisiting the Serial Format of
Dickens’s Novels; or, Little Dorrit Goes a Long Way’, in Christine L. Krueger
(ed.), Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Athens, OH: Ohio UP,
2002), pp. 157–70.
15 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today’, in Gerald Mast,
Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism (New York:
OUP, 1992), pp. 395–402.
16 Giddings and Selby, The Classic Serial, p. 9.

Notes 285
17 Ibid., p. 9 and p. 13; see also pp. 12–13 for details of the regularity with
which nineteenth-century novels were adapted for radio and TV.
18 Ibid., pp. 188–9.
19 Robert MacFarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-
Century Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2007), p. 8.
20 For a detailed discussion of this aesthetic concept see Walter Benjamin, ‘The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt
(ed.), Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 211–44.
21 See Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British
Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999).
22 Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and The Candlelight Murders (London: John
Murray, 2007), pp. 71–4.
23 The characters are taken from The Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1838;
Oliver, Mr Bumble), ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1843; Mrs Fezziwig), and David
Copperfield (1850; Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber).
24 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (1984;
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 1–3, pp. 12–14.
25 Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Museums and the Appropriation of Culture (London:
Athlone Press, 1994), p. 1.
26 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), p. 3
27 Brian Moore, The Great Victorian Collection (1975; London: Paladin, 1988),
p. 9. Further references appear in the text.
28 See David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: CUP, 1985),
pp. 10–13.
29 Seamus Deane, ‘The Real Thing: Brian Moore in Disneyland’, Irish University
Review, 18:1 (1988), p. 74.
30 See ibid., p. 74; see also Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticisms
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), p. 2.
31 United Nations Association in Canada, ‘UNA Canada presents a Sense
of Belonging’, http://www.unac.org/sb/en/hostcommunities/montreal.aspn
32 See Gary Edson (ed.), Museum Ethics (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 36–89.
33 See Norman Palmer, ‘Museums and Cultural Property’, in Vergo, The New
Museology, pp. 172–204.
34 Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (1988; Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2003), p. 377.
36 Ibid.
37 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, p. 96.
38 Ibid., p. 241.
39 Huyssen, Present Pasts, p. 3.
41 Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth
Claman (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), p. 1. First published in Italian in
1977.
42 Part of Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas, BBC 1, 24 December 2009.
43 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Cranford Chronicles (London: Vintage, 2007).
44 Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy (London: Penguin, 2008),
composed of Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), Candleford Green

286 Notes
(1943). The trilogy was later dramatized by Keith Dewhurst, Lark Rise to
Candleford (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
45 For Cranford viewing figures see http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/
stories/2008/03_march/31/cranford.shtml (accessed 20 September 2008); Lark
Rise viewing details can be found via a BBC Press Release in January 2008:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/01_january/25/

lark.shtml (accessed 20 September 2008).
46 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 4.
47 Ibid., p. 6.
48 Giddings and Selby, The Classic Serial, p. ix.
49 See Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline
(London: Methuen, 1987).
50 James Thompson, ‘The BBC and the Victorians’, in Taylor and Wolff, The
Victorians since 1901, p. 163.
51 Chris Loutitt has recently written of the need to see such adaptations ‘in the
context of the period’s [the mid-2000s] political and ideological mood’, argu-
ing that the BBC adaptations of Cranford and Bleak House are ‘clearly cultural
products of the Blairite era’: see ‘Cranford, Popular Culture and the Politics
of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television’, Adaptation, 2:1 (2009),
pp. 35, 36.
52 The bucolic adaptation of the adventures of Ma and Pop Larkin in ITV’s
serialization of Bates’s novels and stories has long served as a classic model
of the family-focused classic adaptation.
53 H.J. Massingham, ‘Introduction’ to Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford,
pp. 9–10.
54 See Giddings and Selby, The Classic Serial, pp. 80–103.
55 Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation revisited: Television and the classic novel (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2002), p. 1. See also Cardwell’s essay ‘Literature on the small
screen: television adaptations’, in Cartmell and Whelehan, The Cambridge
Companion to Literature on Screen, pp. 181–95.
56 Cardwell, Adaptation revisited, p. 2.
57 See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), especially chapter 9.
58 Cardwell, Adaptation revisited, p. 185.
59 Ibid, p. 186.
60 Ibid., p. 209.
61 Ronald R. Thomas, ‘Specters of the Novel: Dracula and the Cinematic
Afterlife of the Victorian Novel’, in John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff
(eds), Victorian Afterlife: Postnodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 307.
62 Ibid., p. 292.
63 See Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, ‘Victorians on Broadway at the Present
Time’, in Krueger, Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, pp. 79–94;
and Weltman’s ‘Victorians on the Contemporary Stage’, Journal of Victorian
Culture, 13:2 (2008), pp. 303–9. For Weltman’s interpretation of The King and
I in relation to its original sources see ‘The King and Who? Dance, Difference,
and Identity in The King and I and Anna Leonowens’, in Birch and Llewellyn,
Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 171–85. For recent
plays in the UK see Warwick sociologist Steven Fuller’s Lincoln and Darwin –
Live for One Night Only! (2008) and Three Women after the Soul of William James

Notes 287
(2009; the three women are Harriet Martineau, Darwin’s French translator
Clemence Royer, and Helena Blavatsky), http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/swfuller/
entry/new_play_three/ (accessed on 3 October 2009).
64 Libretto, The Woman in White (London: Really Useful Group, 2003), p. 39.
65 Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 3. See also Stam’s essay ‘Beyond Fidelity: The

Dialogics of Adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000), pp. 54–76.
66 Judith Mackrell, ‘Because Wilde’s worth it: Dorian Gray re-imagined as a gay
aftershave model for our times?’, The Guardian, 12 June 2008, http://www.
guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/jun/12/dance.culture (accessed 3 October 2009).
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Cartmell and Whelehan, ‘A practical understanding of literature on screen’,
p. 240.
70 Malcolm Bradbury, Cuts (1987; London: Arena, 1988), pp. 16–17.
p. 239.
72 In September 2009 Davies’s adaptation received seven Emmys: Andrew
Clark, ‘BBC drama Little Dorrit takes seven Emmy awards’, The Guardian,
21 September 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2009/sep/21/
emmy-awards-little-dorrit-30-rock-mad-men (accessed 3 October 2009).
73 See Alaistair Jamieson, ‘BBC Costume Drama Little Dorrit sees audiences
slide only halfway through its run’, Daily Telegraph, 23 November 2008,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/3507849/
BBC-costume-drama-Little-Dorrit-sees-audience-slide-only-halfway-
through-its-run.html (accessed 3 October 2009).
74 For details see Leigh Holmwood, ‘Bonnets and bodices lose attraction
for BBC’, The Guardian, 10 January 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/
media/2009/jan/10/television-bbc-drama (accessed 3 October 2009).
75 See Cartmell and Whelehan, ‘A practical understanding of literature on
screen’, pp. 241–2.
76 Boyd Tonkin, ‘Why BBC costume drama needs to go beyond bodices’,
The Independent, 7 November 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/tv/features/why-bbc-costume-drama-needs-to-go-beyond-
bodices-997577.html (accessed 3 October 2009).
77 Jakob Loethe, ‘Narrative Vision in Middlemarch: The Novel Compared with
the BBC Television Adaptation’, in Karen Chase (ed.), Middlemarch in the
Twenty-First Century (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 178.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid, p. 179.
80 Ibid., pp. 180–1.
81 Ibid., pp. 182–3.
82 ‘Mendes to direct Middlemarch film’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain-
ment/6577101.stm (accessed 20 April 2007).
p. 242.
85 Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (London: Reaktion Books,
2006), p. 8.

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Index
Note: illustrations are referenced in bold.

Abbott, Edwin A. 191–2 anatomy 37
Flatland 191–2 ancestral heritage 28
abolitionism 82–91, 108, 123, see also domestic space – ancestral
136, 138 home
abuse Andress, David 10
child 107 angelology 163–7
sexual 38–9, 125, 191 Anglicanism 78, 126
see also incest; rape Anthropological Society of
academia 10, 17–18, 107–8, 150–2, London 131
182, 191, 228 anthropology 121
accuracy see also ethnography
in historical detail 21 anti-imperialism 122
literary 35 appropriation 4, 9–10, 17, 19, 26–7,
adaptation 8, 9, 10, 16–18, 22, 31, 29, 31, 114
211–43 Arabian Nights 96, 101, 102
of the classics 226, 234–6 Armstrong, Gillian
musical 166, 232 Death Defying Acts 185
theory of 8, 22–3, 32, 211 Armstrong, Isobel 30, 143–5, 152
TV 8, 27, 31–2, 212, 221–37 Victorian Glassworlds 30, 143
aesthetics 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 27, army
130, 161, 216, 222 imperial 95
feminine 132 Arnold, Matthew 27
afterlife ‘Dover Beach’ 25, 27
cultural 2–3 Arts and Craft Movement 131, 134
literary 2 Ashbee, Henry Spencer (aka ‘Pisanus
alchemy 169 Fraxi’ and ‘Walter’) 131,
Alexander, Elizabeth 138, 139
‘The Venus Hottentot’ 120 astronomy 76
Alexander, Michael 228 Atwood, Margaret
allusion 28 Alias Grace 91
Amenábar, Alejandro Austen, Jane 40, 130, 135, 212
The Others 65 Pride and Prejudice 1, 2, 241
America 45 Australia 55–6, 59
American Anti-Slavery Society 90 authenticity 1, 15, 19, 22, 30, 96,
Amin, Qasim 108, 114, 145, 175, 190, 235
The Liberation of Women 103 bodily 50, 108, 114
The New Woman 103 meta- 148
anamnesis 34 post- 1, 23–4, 182
anarchism 108 and theme parks 214–16
Anatomical Venus 136, 137, 141 authorship 34, 45, 47–8
311

312 Index
autobiography 40 Blunt, Wilfred 95

fictional 34, 40 body, the
see also genre female 29, 106–42
automata 63, 207 politics of 29
maternal 42
Baartman, Saartje 20, 29, 110, 114, subjected to scientific

120–31, 132, 134 discussion 106–42
Baden-Powell, Robert 162 Bolt, Christine 81
ballads 39 bookbinding 108, 131–40
Barndollar, David 215 Booker Prize
Barnes, Julian see Man Booker Prize
Arthur & George 68 Booth, Wayne C. 22
Barnham, Phineas Taylor 206 Boston Female Anti-Slavery
Barrett, Andrea Society 82, 90
The Voyage of the Narwhal 68, 123 Bourne, Matthew 233–4
Barrett family 69 Dorian Gray 233–4, 236
and slave ownership 81–91 Bowie, David 180
Barrett, Richard 86 Bowker, Peter
Barrett, Samuel 82–4 Desperate Romantics 235
Barrett, Susan Boyd, Harry 95
Fixing Shadows 15–16 Boyle, Clara 95
Bates, H. E. 230 Bradbury, Malcolm
Baudelaire, Charles Cuts 236–7
Les Fleurs du Mal 120 Brandreth, Gyles
Baudrillard, Jean 31, 174–7, 183–4, Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight
189, 190, 192, 199, 210 Murders 108, 217–19
hyperreality 31, 174, 175, 196–8, Breuer, Josef 34
219 Brewster, David 202
third order simulation 31, 176, Briggs, Asa 224
184, 192–3, 220 British Museum 58, 59
belatedness 3, 14, 28, 34, 148 Broadway 232
Belsey, Catherine 3, 153 Bronfen, Elisabeth 141
Bendyshe, Thomas 131 Brontë, Anne
Bernard Yeazell, Ruth 102 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 42
Bergson, Henri 64 Brontë, Charlotte 12, 136
Bhabha, Homi 29, 66, 70, 73–4, 97 Jane Eyre 2, 9, 34, 41, 42, 49, 53,
Bildungsroman 25 55, 65, 67, 82, 86, 120, 130
biofiction 82, 121 Villette 12–13, 55
biography 20, 21–3, 36, 47–8, 92, Brontë, Emily
108 Wuthering Heights 34, 41–2, 49, 65
biology 37, 41 Brophy, Sarah 91
Blaine, David 201 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 19, 20,
Blake, Sarah 29, 82–91, 98
Grange House 28, 35, 36, 41–7, 48, Aurora Leigh 98–9
51, 53, 64 ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s
Blake, William 164 Point’ 82–9
Blakley, Claudia 227 Browning, Robert 82, 85
Bloom, Harold 3 Bürger, Gottfried August
anxiety of influence 3 ‘Lenore’ 141

Index 313
Burger, Neil Chase, Karen 1–2, 240

The Illusionist (film) 31, 176, Chase-Riboud, Barbara
201–9, 240 Hottentot Venus 29, 110, 111, 113,
Burne-Jones, Edward 164 116, 120–31, 135, 136, 138
Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth (aka ‘The The President’s Daughter 124
Little Professor’) 6–7, 11, 14 Sally Hemings 124

Burton, Richard 131 Chatterton, Thomas 74
Butler, Samuel 192–3 childhood 54, 125, 156–63
‘Darwin Among the parental relationship 34, 155–63
Machines’ 198 trauma 34
Erewhon 192, 198 children 84
Evolution, Old and New 192, 193 children’s literature 161–3
Note-Books 192 China 66, 68, 78, 206
Byatt, A. S. 8, 22–3, 143–4 Chopin, Kate
Angels & Insects 171 ‘Desiree’s Baby’ 138
The Children’s Book 30, 156–63, Christian, Barbara 90
166–7, 169 Christianity 77, 151, 169–70
Possession 8, 18, 22–3, 35, 38, 162, Cixous, Hélène 140
165 Clark, Jonathan 11
Byron, George 37, 94 class 106, 188
and caste 77
Caine, Michael 180 system 77–8
Callow, Simon working 45, 98, 116–20,
The Importance of Being Oscar 215 131, 188
The Mystery of Charles Dickens 215 see also servants
Cambridge 23, 182 clitoridectomy 135
Cameron, Charles Duncan 131 collection
Cameron, Margaret 118 intuitionist and decisionist
Campion, Jane positions 225
The Piano 9, 69 politics of 107, 121, 157, 220–8
Canada 220–2 see also exhibition culture
Cannibal Club 131, 140 Collins, Wilkie
canonical literature 4, 22, 25 The Woman in White 21–2, 42, 49,
neo-Victorian 9–10 52, 65
capitalism 77, 220–9, 244 colonialism 8
Cardwell, Sarah 231 see also postcolonialism
Carlyle, Thomas 164 Conan Doyle, Arthur 153
Carroll, Lewis 136 Conrad, Joseph 130
Alice in Wonderland 56, 58, 63, 168 consciousness 192, 194
Carter, Angela see also mind
‘Black Venus’ 120 contemporary fiction 27
Nights at the Circus 108 Corelli, Marie 68
Castle, Terry 185 costume 39, 99
Castricano, Jodey 148, 172 costume drama 27, 64, 107, 211,
Cesars, Hendrik 123 226–36
Cesars, Peter 125 Cox, Michael
Chambers, Emma 228 The Meaning of Night:
Chapman, Maria Weston 82 A Confession 23, 182
characterization 7, 20 see also authenticity, post-

314 Index
Cox, Renée Valerie 120 Dickens, Charles 25–7, 136, 146,

Crais, Clifton 120, 129–30 212, 238–9
Cranford (BBC TV) 32, 236–7, adaptations of 212, 215–16
238, 242 Bleak House 19, 118
criminology 121 Great Expectations 25, 26–7, 33, 34,
Cromer, Lord 95 35, 41, 43, 50, 55, 62, 63, 65, 67,

cross-dressing 39, 118 76, 118
cryptomimesis 148–50, 161, 168, see also Jones, Lloyd Mister Pip
172 Hard Times 215
Cullwick, Hannah 118 A Tale of Two Cities 215
cultural imagination 20 Dickens World 31, 176,
culture 213–14, 244
high vs. low debate 23, 31–2 ‘Dickensian’ 7, 37, 201, 213
Cuvier, Frédéric and Geoffroy Disneyfication 32
Saint-Hillaire Disneyland 175–6, 223
Natural History of Mammals 128 divorce 107
Cuvier, Georges 116, 121–31, domestic space 28, 35, 52, 65,
136, 138 117–20, 156–63
ancestral homes 19, 28,
Dabouss, Sonia 103 35–65, 67
Darwin, Charles 128, 129, 245 country house 59
On the Origin of Species 198 Eastern 101–3
Voyage of the Beagle 80 feminization 35
Darwin, Erasmus libraries within 36, 48, 51, 63
Zoonomia 192 and servants 116–20
daughter 41–7 doubles 63, 176, 178, 181, 183–4
Davies, Andrew 31, 212, 213, Douglas, Frederick
236–44 Narrative of the Life of Frederick
and Charles Dickens 32 Douglas 89
and Sarah Waters 31–2, 242–4 Drewe, Robert
Bleak House (BBC) 32, 215, The Savage Crows 68
237, 239 Duff Gordon, Lucie 69, 96, 98
Little Dorrit (BBC) 32, 237, 238, Du Maurier, Daphne
239, 243–4 Rebecca 49
Middlemarch 240 Duncker, Patricia 145
Day, Gary 145 James Miranda Barry 107–8
death 62 Dunlop, Alexander William 123, 125
‘Declaration of Independence’
89, 124 East India Company 79
‘Declaration of Sentiments’ 89 EastEnders 216, 237
Dee, Jonathan 20 Eco, Umberto 223
democracy 92, 98 ecriture feminine 134
Dench, Judi 227 editor
Denshawai/Dinshawi Affair 95 as literary technique 23
Derrida, Jacques 8, 146, 148, 192, education 118
193 edutainment 141–2
despotism 99 Egypt 28, 68, 91–104
detective fiction 16–17, Eisenstein, Sergei 215
18, 108 Elgar, Edward 166

Index 315
Eliot, George 2, 3, 12, 16, 130, 242 Fielding, Henry 39

Middlemarch 1–2, 3, 16, 54, 55, film 4, 5, 6, 9, 31, 188–210
93–4, 161, 240, 242 First World War 159–61, 229, 235
Eliot, T. S. 67 Fish, Laura
Elliott, Kamilla 212 Strange Music 29, 68–9, 78, 81–91,
novel/film debate 212–13 92

Elzer, Jan Michiel 125 Flaubert, Gustave 130
Emancipation Act 81 Forster, Margaret
empathy 189 Lady’s Maid 98
historical 88, 220 Foucault, Michel 107, 111
Empire 29, 66–105, 205–6, 222–5 Fowles, John 8
England 56, 59 The French Lieutenant’s Woman 8,
epistemology 4, 92 154
erotica 110 freak shows 114, 123, 127, 129, 206
essentialism 130 Freedman, James 201
ethics French, Dawn 227–8
and collection/exhibition 123–4 Freud, Sigmund 34, 43, 63, 64, 65,
and historical fiction 3, 4, 10, 13, 181
19, 20, 87–9 fort/da game 181
ethnography 116, 117, 121, 122, 207
Eugenides, Jeffrey Galton, Francis 128
Middlesex 41 garden 51, 52
Evans, Mark Gardiner, John 213
Bleak Expectations (radio) 238 Garrison, William Lloyd 90
Evans, Richard 13–14 Gaskell, Elizabeth 227, 236
evidence 19 Mary Barton 67
see also detective fiction; research Gay, Penny 5
evolution 192 gaze, the
exhibition culture 107, 116, 121, 123, imperial 98, 121–2
157–9, 161–2, 172–3, 206, 225 politics of 29, 111–12
exoticism 128 and reading 111–12, 131, 149-50,
189
Faber, Michel 11, 13, 14, 17, 23 scientific 118–20, 121–2, 127
The Apple: New Crimson Petal white male 89–91, 121–2,
Stories 12, 14 131–40
The Crimson Petal and the gender 8, 38–41, 66, 106–42
White 11–12, 13, 14, 17, 23, dysphoria 64
107 gender-bending 39
fabrication 19, 31, 34 Genette, Gérard 111
fairy story 143–4 genre
faith 30 autobiography 28, 34
see also religion diaries and journals 28, 34, 36,
family relations 41–63, 65 45, 69
Farrell, J. G. dramatic monologue 83
The Siege of Krishnapur 68 letters 69, 92–3
fatherhood 43 patchwork texts 28
Fausto-Sterling, Anne 121 romance 162
femininity 73 science fiction 191
feminism 28, 104, 119–20, 126 travel writing 100, 103–4

316 Index
Ghosh, Amitav Harris, Jane

Ibis Chrestomathy 70 The Observations 29, 110, 111,
Ibis Trilogy 70 112, 116–20, 125, 130–1, 140
Sea of Poppies 28, 68–9, 70–81, 78, Harris, Lyle Ashton 120
83, 105 Harwood, John
ghosts 84 The Ghost Writer 28, 35, 55–63,

see also spectrality 65, 168
ghost story 55 The Séance 30, 167–72
Giamatti, Paul 203 haunting
Giddings, Robert 211–12, 215, 229 see also spectrality
Gilbert and Sullivan Hegel, G. W. F. 128
Iolanthe 233 Hensher, Philip
Gilmour, Robin 5 The Mulberry Empire 68
Gladstone, W. E. 236 heritage culture 8, 28, 213–18, 229,
glass, use of as metaphor 4, 30, 234, 240
143–73 heritage industry 31–2, 213–18,
as mirror 37, 56, 143–73 229–30, 234
stained glass 163–7 heritage tourism 222
global literature 25, 93 hermaphroditism 39, 41, 121
global politics 29 heterosexuality 39, 107
Goncourt brothers 48 Hewison, Robert 229
Gothic literature 34, 42, 49, 61 historical fiction
Graeme, Kenneth 162 as a genre 4, 6, 15, 23–4, 155
Grand Exposition Universelle 158 as romance 68
Great Exhibition 164 and women writers 9
Great Famine (Ireland) 42, 45, 64 historians 10–11, 150–5
Grenville, Kate historical figures
The Secret River 68 uses of within neo-
Grenville, Lord 123 Victorianism 19–20
Griffin, Susan 110, 127 historiography 11, 30, 66, 70, 150–5
Gutleben, Christian 6, 7, 18, 55 history
and imagination 10–11
Hagens, Gunther von 141–2 Victorian 8
Haggard, Henry Rider Hobbes, Thomas 74
She 182 Hobsbawm, Eric 27
Hankey, Frederick 131 Hodgson, John Studholme 131
Hapsburg Empire 206, 208 Holmes, Rachel 120–1, 122
Haraway, Donna homosexuality 39, 121, 139–40, 185
‘Cyborg Manifesto’ 198 Hore, Rachel
Harding, John Wesley (aka Wesley The Glass-Painter’s Daughter 30,
Stace) 39 163–7
Hardy, Thomas Houdini, Harry 185, 207, 208
The Hand of Ethelberta 187 Huet, Nicolas 128
Tess of the d’Urbervilles 82 humanism 146
harem 94–5, 101–3 Hume, David 74
Harold, James 20–1 Hutcheon, Linda 32, 211, 228, 244
Harper, Francis Huxley, Thomas Henry 128
‘The Slave Mother: A Tale of Huyssen, Andreas 225
Ohio’ 89 ‘memory fatigue’ 225–8

Index 317
hybridity James, Henry 2, 9, 20, 55

bodily 73 ‘The Aspern Papers’ 20
cultural and adaptive 216 The Bostonians 189
gendered 39 The Turn of the Screw 34, 42, 55,
linguistic 35, 69 57, 63, 65, 82, 151, 168, 186
see also language TV adaptation 229

and postcolonialism 66–105 What Masie Knew 44
and resistance 70–81 James, M(ontague) R(hodes) 18, 151
spiritual 73 James, William 64
hysteria 33–4, 38–9, 135, 185–6, 208 Jameson, Frederic 231
nostalgia film 231
identity Janet, Pierre 64
black female 84–86, 121–3 Jay, Ricky 201
black male 108 Jefferson, Thomas 124, 128
community 79 John, Juliet 214
female 29 Johnson, Aaron 201
ideology 77–8 Johnston, Judith 5
illegitimacy 45 Jones, Lloyd 24
illusion Mister Pip 24–7, 68
magical 202 Joyce, Simon 9, 144
optical 38, 198
textual 19, 202 Kaplan, Cora 4–5, 9, 18, 20, 24,
see also magic 33–4, 144–5, 224
Illusionist, The (film) Keller, Evelyn Fox 106
see Burger, Neil Khoisan (also Knoekhoe/
imagination 64, 84, 93, 100 Khoikhoi) 114, 116, 121, 122, 124
imperialism 29, 67, 110, 121 King, Jeanette 9, 106–7
see also empire; slavery Kingsmill, Hugh 2–3
incest 37, 41, 43, 49–50, 51 Kitchener, Lord 95
indebtedness 25 Kneale, Matthew
independence 92 English Passengers 68
India 28, 66, 68, 78 Kohlke, Marie-Luise 68, 107
industrialization 27 Kontou, Tatiana 9, 147, 187
inheritance 28, 34, 35, 38, 53, 188 Krueger, Christine 9
familial 34–65
paternal 53 Lacan, Jacques 192–3
interculturalism 76, 91 Language 28, 70, 95, 195
internationalism 25 Arabic 70
intersexuality 38 Bengali 70
intertextuality 17–18, 38 bilinguism 74
Ireland 45 Chinese 70
Islam 93 English 74–5
Iwanisziw, Susan 121 etymology 96
experimental 69
Jacobs, Harriet Hindu 70
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Laskari 70
Girl 89 malapropism 72
Jacobus, Mary 106 miscommunication 72
Jamaica 68, 81–91 monolinguism 75

318 Index
Language – continued magic realism 80, 220

multilinguism 71, 91 Man Booker Prize 24, 68
pidgin 70 Mangan, Michael 174, 175, 176
polyvocalism 73 Mandler, Peter 10–11, 13
Urdu 70 marginalization 17
Lark Rise to Candleford (TV) 32, market

226–7, 242 literary and cultural 27, 31,
Laub, Dori 54 213
laudanum 79 mainstream 31, 213
Law, the 24, 71, 73, 126 Markus, Jane 86
Leavis, F. R. 3 marriage 39, 80, 94, 99, 101–2,
Lee, Easton 83 118, 125, 126
Lee, Vernon 168 Martin, Emily 110
LeFanu, Sheridan 153 Martin, Valerie
legacy Mary Reilly 82
financial 60 Property 83
Le Goff, Jacques 64, 226–7 Martineau, Harriet 100
lesbianism 107, 121, 181, 185–6, 189 Marxism 149
Levine, George 169 Maseko, Zola 120
Lewis, Frederick Christian Massingham, Hugh 230
‘Sartjee the Hottentot Venus’ 115 Mason, Daniel
Lewis, John Frederick 96, 100 The Piano Tuner 68
The Reception 100, 101 master/slave relationship 76–81,
The Siesta 102 90, 97
The Liberty Bell 82 matrilineal heritage 28, 41–7,
Ligon, Richard 168
True and Exact History of the Island of Maudsley, Henry 52
Barbados 121 Maxwell, James Clerk 192
Lincoln, Abraham 128 Mayhew, Henry
Locke, John 74 London Labour and the London
Lodge, David Poor 117
Nice Work 16, 237 McClintock, Anne 118
London 57, 59, 61, 79, 130, 168 McEwan, Ian 24–7
London Society of Bookbinders 134 On Chesil Beach 24, 25
Lothe, Jacob 240 Saturday 25, 26–7
Lowenthal, David 225 McFarlane, Robert 216
The Lustful Turk 95, 138 medicine 52, 59
medievalism 30, 163–7, 235
Macarthur, J. W. S. Melville, Herman
Notes on an Opium Factory 79 ‘Benito Cereno’ 79
madness 46, 51, 67, 87, 117, 119–20 The Encantadas 79
magic 30–1, 174–210, 211 Moby Dick 79
as metafictional 174–6 Mendes, Sam 241
and film-making 181 memory 28, 33–63, 67, 167
‘In a Flash’ trick 180 cultural 8, 28, 75
‘mirror trick’ 201–2 familial 28, 33–63
misdirection 175, 176, 179, 186 fatigue 225
trick 31 traumatic 49, 56
Victorian 178, 180 mesmerism 170

Index 319
metafiction 4, 6, 17–18 myth

definition of 31 Classical 38, 196
see also magic Egyptian 93
metahistory 4, 6, 28 family 37
metanarrative 28 foundational 75
metaphor origin 174

embroidery 93–4, 132 power of 75
metaphysical 31
Michelet, Jules 13 Nalbantian, Suzanne 65
Mill, John Stuart 94, 245 Naldrett, Sally 98
Millhauser, Steven narrative
‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ 31, linearity 51
176, 184, 201–09 style 28
Milnes, Richard Monckton narrative voice 14–15, 39–40, 187
131, 140 narrator 15, 38, 40, 92
mind first-person 40, 69
games 190 gendered 38, 83–4
travel 190–201 multiple 83
misogynism 128 third-person 40, 92–3
modernism 3 unreliable 24
modernity 3, 159 nationalism 92, 103, 104
Moore, Brian natural History Museum 127
The Great Victorian Collection 32, necromancy 170
213, 220–26, 244 necrophilia 132
Morris, William 163, 235 neo-Edwardianism 156
Morrison, Toni 88, 124 neo-slave narrative 68
Beloved 68, 90 Neo-Victorian Studies 5
‘re-membering’ 88, 124 neo-Victorianism
Motherhood 41–7, 55 definition of 5–6, 8–10, 23–4, 244–5
biological 46, 55, 61 and faux-Victorian 5
spectral 65 and historical fiction 6
Mother–daughter relationship and ‘Little Professor’s Rules’ 6–7
41–7 and post-Victorian 5, 6, 25
Moulton, Charles 86 and retro-Victorian 5
mourning 28, 33–65, 67, 148 neuroscience
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household and memory 33, 35
Management 116 and reading 1–2
Multilinguism New Historicism 171
see language New Scientist 1
Mulvey, Laura 110, 127 Newman, John Henry 164
Munby, Arthur 118 The Dream of Gerontius 165–7
murder 62, 108, 183, 203 Newtonian physics 193, 195
child 108 New Woman 40, 96
Musée de L’Homme 116 Arabic 95–103
museology 159, 220, 222 Nichols, Grace
Muséum d’Histoire 116 Fat Black Woman’s Poems 120
mutilation Nolan, Christopher
genital 110 The Prestige (film) 31, 176, 178–84,
Mwangi, Ingrid 120 186, 201, 206, 240

320 Index
Nolan, Jonathan 183 Poe, Edgar Allan

Northern Rock 230 ‘Lenore’ 141
Norton, Edward 201 poetry 22–3, 38, 82–91
nostalgia 18, 26, 32, 34, 55, 56, 64, political correctness 6
107, 157, 162, 228, 236 politics 3, 5, 6
and fetishization 107 popular culture 39

Nunn, Trevor 32 pornography 29, 32, 95, 108, 121
nymphomania 121 book trade in 108, 131–40
ethnographic 132
Oliver Twist (TV adaptation) 216 postcolonial 24, 26, 66–105
Onega, Susana 154 theory 29, 66–105
opium 68, 76 Poster, Jem
First Opium War 68, 78 Courting Shadows 30, 150–8
optical illusion 198 postmodernism 11, 18, 27, 64, 175,
orientalism 68, 79, 91–104, 107 200, 211, 217
Victorian 28, 67, 91–104 poststructuralism 191, 193
orphans 60 pregnancy 46, 83, 118
Ovid Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 50, 57,
Metamorphoses 37, 38, 40 134, 235
Prestige, The (film)
painting 59–60, 61, 95 see Nolan, Christopher
Paley, William 194 Priest, Christopher
Palliser, Charles The Prestige (novel) 31, 178,
The Quincunx 35, 154 182
The Unburied 30, 150–6 Priestly, J. B.
panopticism 189 An Inspector Calls 209
paratextuality 110–16 prostitution 74, 107, 116,
parenthood 119, 121
adoptive 43 Proust, Marcel 18
biological 43 Pugin, Augustus 163
Park, Susan-Lori psychic investigation 168–70
Venus 120 psychoanalysis 28, 195
parody 108 psychology 40, 46
past 3 evolutionary 1
function of 3 Pullinger, Kate
pastiche 22–3, 64, 108, 150, 173 The Mistress of Nothing 29, 68, 82,
Patmore, Coventry 164 91, 99–104
Pearce, Susan 220 Pushkin, Alexander 130
Pearsall, Ronald 147
performativity 50 quantum physics 176, 191, 193–4
periodization 8–9 queer 39
philanthropy 119 Qureshi 122, 124
photography 15, 95, 118, 159, 168,
217, 234 race 29, 66–105
phrenology 117 racism 125
physiognomy 117, 130, 136 scientific 129–30
piracy 77 rape 52–3, 79, 83, 86, 87–8, 90,
plagiarism 22 110–11, 131
Plath, Sylvia 191 scientific 111, 129

Index 321
readers 2, 4, 11–14, 17–18, 23, 57–8, Savoy Magazine 57

88, 105, 114, 173, 176 Sawalha, Julia 227
academic and non-academic 17–18, scepticism 30
228 Schiebinger, Londa 110, 122
as observers 111–12, 155 Schor, Hilary 171
reading 4, 12–14, 57–8, 59, 111–12, Schorn, Susan 215

125, 170, 176, 178 Schreiner, Olive 122
real vs. fictional debate 20–2 From Man to Man 120
realism 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 34, 155, The Story of an African Farm 34
157, 217 science 29, 30, 62, 106–42, 170
reality 58, 146, 194–6 methodologies 119
virtual 196, 211 see also gaze, scientific
reform scientist/s 30
social 93–4 scopic culture 143–5
religion 30, 72–3, 77, 145–73, 194 scopophilia 29, 107, 110–16, 127
and fanaticism 78 scopopornia 128
repetition Scott, Walter 13
historical 43 Scully, Pamela 120, 129–30
research 16, 92, 165 séance 30, 147, 204
responsibility Second World War 226
marital 47 secularism 30, 151–5
moral 47, 79 Selby, Keith 211–12, 215, 229
restoration Self, Will
as metaphor for neo- Dorian 234
Victorianism 152 self-help 118
Revelations of a Spirit Medium 171 Senn, Charlene 110
‘re-vision’ 91–104, 106, 173 sensation fiction 18–19, 54
rewriting 28, 82 servants 46, 75, 98–9, 116–20, 188
Reynolds, Mary 133 relationship with mistress 117–20,
Rhys, Jean 8 188
Wide Sargasso Sea 8, 67, 82, 83, 91 Setterfield, Diane 65
Richardson, Samuel 40 The Thirteenth Tale 28, 35, 36,
Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugène 175, 207 47–55, 56, 64, 176, 177, 178
romance 55, 162 Sewell, Rufus 203
family 50 sex 8, 29, 106–42
Roof, Judith 158 and exploitation 119
Rose, Steven 33, 35 sexology 64, 121, 141
Rousseau, 131 sexuality 24, 40
Rowlandson, Thomas and libertinism 108
The Pasha 95 and repression 23
Royal Geographic Society 131 Shafts 108
Ruskin, John 163, 166–7, 232 Shakespeare, William 219
Hamlet 192
Said, Edward 29, 80 Shaw, George Bernard
Culture & Imperialism 67 ‘The Denshawai Horror’ 95
Orientalism 92, 96 ‘Preface for Politicians’ 95
Sample, Ian 1, 2 Shelley, Mary 130
Sanders, Julie 16, 17, 21, 22, 24 Frankenstein 34
Saumarez Smith, Charles 159, 167 Shuttleworth, Sally 106

322 Index
sibling relationships 43, 48–50, 51, 63 Strachey, Lytton 21

and rivalry 35, 59 subaltern/ity 28, 29, 66, 67–105,
Sigel, Lisa 110, 131–2, 140 139, 189
sisterhood 52, 60, 178 see also voice
slavery 29, 69, 77, 80–1, 122, 123 subjectivity 29, 224–5
apprenticeship system 81 Summerscale, Kate

sexual 81–91, 122 The Suspicions of Mr Whicher 108
Smith, Zadie 2, 3, 4 supernatural 59
Society for Psychical Research 171 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 131
Soo, Chung Ling 182, 206
Sorensen, Colin 214 tattoos 135
Soueif, Ahdaf Taylor, D. J. 16
The Map of Love 28–9, 68–9, 78, Kept: A Victorian Mystery 16–19,
91–105 22, 23, 40
Mezzaterra 96 Taylor, Harriet 94
South Africa 111, 116, 122, 130 Taylor, Henry 123
South Kensington Museum (Victoria taxidermy 122
and Albert Museum) 157 technology 76, 208, 211, 214–15
spectrality 24, 25, 30, 55–63, 143–73 television 211
specularity 30 see also adaptation
speech Tennant, Emma
see voice Tess 82
Spiller, Hortense 122 Two Women of London 82
and pornotropic 122 Tennyson, Alfred 42, 136
spiritualism 9, 30, 60, 156–72, 181, Tesla, Nikola 180
184, 185–6, 204 Thackeray, William Makepeace 18
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 29, Vanity Fair 40, 120
66–7, 69, 80, 86–7, 98 thanatica 110
Stace, Wesley Thatcher, Margaret 5, 237
Misfortune 28, 35, 37–41, 48, 51, The 1900 House (TV series) 226
57, 64 The Edwardian Country House
Stam, Robert 233 (TV series) 226
Starling, Belinda theatre 31
The Journal of Dora Damage 29, theme park culture 213–18
108, 109, 110, 131–40 Thierry, Jacques-Nicolas-Augustin 13
stereotype 95 Thomas, Ronald 231–2
steatopygia 121 Thomas, Scarlett
Sterne, Laurence The End of Mr Y 31, 176, 190–201,
Tristram Shandy 40 210, 221
Stevenson, Robert Louis Thompson, Flora 226, 227, 236
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Thompson, James 230
Mr Hyde 49, 82 Tiedemann, Frederick 128, 129
Stone, Marjorie 89–90 time travel 195
Stoker, Bram Tonkin, Boyd 239
Dracula 1, 34, 172 Toryism 132
storytelling 27, 36–7, 43, 44, 48, Tractarianism 151
58–60, 149, 188 transculturalism 91–104
Stowe, Harriet Beecher transgression 188
Uncle Tom’s Cabin 89 sexual 39, 107

Index 323
translation 91 Walker, Alice

transvestism 39, 107 The Color Purple 91
trauma 28, 36–65, 67, 86–8 Walker, Margaret
domestic and familial 29, 36–65 Jubilee 68
historical 29, 87 Wallace, Diana 9
theories of 28 Walpole, Horace

and witnessing 37, 47–55, 63, 64, The Castle of Otranto 49
87, 88 Waters, Catherine 5
Tremain, Rose Waters, Sarah 8, 19, 31, 176
The Colour 68 adaptations of novels for TV 31–2,
trickery 170–1 107, 242–4
see also magic Affinity 19, 31, 149–50, 173, 176,
Trollope, Anthony 216, 230, 237 181, 184–90, 190, 210, 242, 243
Troyanov, Illiya Fingersmith 4, 139, 242
The Collector of Worlds 68 The Little Stranger 65
Turner, J. W. M. 21–2 Tipping the Velvet 108, 242, 243
Turkey 64 Waugh, Patricia 31, 174
twins 48, 176–8 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 233
The Woman in White 32, 232–3
Uncanny, the 42, 55, 63, 194 Webber, Julian Lloyd 233
utopianism 190 Wicomb, Zoe 124
David’s Story 120
ventriloquism 22–3, 86, 147, 200 widowhood 72, 80
Vickers, Salley Widowson, Peter 11
Mr Golightly’s Holiday 200 Wilde, James Plaisted 131
Victoria, Queen 8, 79 Wilde, Oscar 19, 136, 217–19, 233–5
Victorian Williams, Raymond 3
defining the 3–4, 21 Wilson, A. N.
novel 2, 4, 12, 17, 27, 93–4, 155, 171 A Jealous Ghost 82
readers 1, 2, 12 Wilson, James 22
sexuality 107 The Dark Clue: A Novel of
stereotypical 6–8, 47 Suspense 21–2
values 5, 40 Wolfreys, Julian 146–8, 172
Victorian Farm (TV series) 226 Womack, Kenneth 10
Victorian fiction 1–3 women’s rights 101–4, 106–7
as precursor text 16–17, 35, 155 women’s writing 9, 29, 36–7, 41–8,
Victorian Studies 32 57–9, 65, 91, 119–20
Victoriana 17, 32, 33, 213, 222–8 Wood, Victoria 227
violence 51, 77, 131 Woolf, Virginia 2, 16, 146
see also rape Orlando 40
voice 70, 104 To the Lighthouse 16
literary 97 Wordsworth, Dorothy 132
of the subaltern 29, 97–9, 104 writing, acts of 36, 41, 44, 49, 56–7,
Voigts-Virchow, Eckhart 212–13 59, 65, 91, 119, 125–7
Voltaire 128 Wynne, Catherine 100
voyeurism 114, 116
Yellow Book 57
Wachowski, Andy and Larry
The Matrix 198 Žižek, Slavoj 146

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Neo-Victorianism

The Victorians in the Twenty-First

Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

THE LATE-VICTORIAN MARRIAGE QUESTION

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NEW WOMAN HYBRIDITIES (co-edited with Margaret Beetham)

NEW WOMAN STRATEGIES: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird

Also by Mark Llewellyn

CONFLICT AND DIFFERENCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Also by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF GEORGE MOORE: Gender and Genre

METAFICTION AND METAHISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

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10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

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Introduction: Neo-Victorianism and Post-Authenticity:

1 Memory, Mourning, Misfortune: Ancestral Houses

2 Race and Empire: Postcolonial Neo-Victorians 66

3 Sex and Science: Bodily and Textual (Re)Inscriptions 106

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

3.3 Race, science, and the gaze: Barbara

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5 Doing It with Mirrors, or Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

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10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

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10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

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10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

‘Doing It With Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity,

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10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

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The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending

What better justifies a collection of new essays on an

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

exert a pressure on the twenty-first century as vitally as

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10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

own merits instead of being regarded as embodiments of an epoch

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That 19th-century English novels continue to be written today with

The points raised by Smith, a twenty-first-century novelist who does not

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

interrelations and influences. For readers of and writers on Victorian

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10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

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5. The term ‘Neo,’ when used in conjunction with a political movement,

The determination to provide a precise (and positive) definition of neo-

10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

with reclaiming the significance of that prefix ‘neo-’, so that it is more

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10.1057/9780230281691 - Neo-Victorianism, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

Classes, c) a man not their husband and of Another Race, or d) a

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