Greetings from the Editor

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2016-01-01
Journal	Victorians
Authors	Deborah Anna Logan

Abstract

6 Victorians Journal Greetings from the editor As editor of VictoriansJournal, I am pleased and excited to offer the following new work on Victorian literature and culture. Although entirely serendipitous, these distinct and idiosyncratic articles synthesize a remarkably unified set of themes: infection, contamination, and the permeability of boundaries; the enduring fascination with the Woman Question, particularly in terms offemale sexuality and respectability; and the engendering and displacement of sympathy. This singular dovetailing surely indicates current trending in Victorian studies, further enhanced by application to lesser-known texts of interest to scholars. Gretchen Braun’s ‘“the natural company of such as I am’: Corruption, Purification, and Dickens’s Feminine Thames” investigates the Victorian phenomenon of fallen women “FOUND DROWNED” in the Thames River. Braun’s study measures the “historical reality” of these cases against their cultural representation as depicted in newspapers, literature, and fine art. Her approach reveals an overlapping of such factors as industrial capitalism, economics and its particular impact on women, the regulation of female sexuality, and government efforts to purify and regulate the Thames following the scandalous “Great Stink” of 1858. The evolution ofDickens’s treatment ofsuicidal fallen women illustrates that both social and environmental campaigns reflect a gradual shift in attitudes toward those “unfortunates” ofany class who could envision no solution to their plight but a watery death in a polluted river. The era’s interest in the urbanization sparked by industrial capitalism, with the resulting class and economic ambiguities of shifting cultural boundaries, incorporates the sociological approach of urban reformers. Such investigators as Charles Booth “documented the appearance of London’s buildings and streets by distinguishing areas ofpoverty, crime, and disease from areas of wealth and health through carelul and detailed maps.” The permeability of contagion and disease— cholera, for example—proved that neither class nor wealth offered protection against contamination. Similarly, “The Strangely Mobile Mr. Hyde” by Theresa Adams analyzes this dynamic in terms of the “wholly evil” Edward Hyde and the “incongruous compound” that is Henry Jekyll. Adams concludes that “Crime and disease, like Hyde himself, are not confined to specific spaces on the map but can and do travel freely throughout London.” The shape-shifting that transforms the respectable doctor into the rampaging criminal raises questions about the threat the privileged classes ultimately pose to themselves. Continuing the theme ofinfection—moral (fallen women), physical (cholera), existential (“evil”), and social (criminality), “Decadent Reading Strategies and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle” by Frederick King and Alison Lee extends vulnerable boundaries geo-politically. Read through the lens of Decadent aesthetics, Marsh’s novel presents contamination on an international scale, through the grotesquely eroticized infection ofan Englishman by a mysterious Egyptian woman; apparently reconfigured as the Beetle, the creature shows up in London, bent on revenge against the man, who is now a reformist politician. The Beetle is also a shapeshifter , a factor that remains unexplained; but it is the eroticization of permeable human boundaries that give this horror story its particular slant. An Englishman may go out into the world a free agent; but he returns an agent ofcontagion, paving the way to introduce foreign infection into the heart ofthe empire. Victorians Journal 7 Another social breach concerns women and their property—for the Victorians, a contradiction in terms. Danielle Barkley’s “Interpreting Sympathy in The Eustace Diamonds ’ investigates generic ambiguity—the novel itself “representing a fusion of sensation fiction, detective novel, and legal critique” —as a reflection of the vexed question ofproperty and ownership. Widowed Lizzie Eustace insists that the family diamonds are hers to keep; she forfeits our sympathy in her plight through her lies and machinations, and in the end loses the diamonds as well. Barkley notes that “the liminality of fact and fiction and oflies and truth is something of a critical commonplace”; but what this analysis addresses is “that the liminality does not work towards resolution.” Trollope offers a conclusion, yet it is maddeningly unresolved. Sympathy is also central to Lauren Hoffer’s “Unmanageable Sympathy in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch.” Here, too, genre expectations are breached, primarily through the conflicting claims ofnarrative voice. Readers might anticipate that the titular character, “poor Miss Finch,” would unquestionably earn our sympathy…

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Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vct.2016.0000