Tom Crewe’s 2023 novel The New Life reconstructs the collaboration between sexologist Havelock Ellis and cultural critic John Addington Symonds as they wrote their 1897 study Sexual Inversion. Historically, Sexual Inversion was banned in 1898 following an obscenity trial the homophobia of which bore the imprint of the Wilde Trials in 1895. Arguably, The New Life comprises an experiment in affective historiography. Crewe, a trained historian, draws upon authentic letters, memoirs and treatises. These texts prompt protagonists’ crises and self-discovery; they wince at or surrender to or resist their authority. Crewe appeals to us via emotional resonances in his writing and validates our ways of connecting with historical materials. Yet Crewe also undermines readers’ presentist desires for queer characters to express gay pride; instead, he shows how outing oneself in the 1890s might feel liberatory but endangers one’s companions. Crewe’s project thus mirrors late-Victorian efforts at feeling. He invokes a socialist association, the Fellowship of the New Life (1883-97), whose adherents promoted self-perfection through radical compassion. As he designs his plot and develops protagonists’ interior lives, Crewe centres empathy as much as late-Victorian ethical socialists did.

Varney the Vampire offers valuable insights into the popular press’s role in both reflecting and helping to shape the public’s changing attitudes toward suicide during the Victorian period. Varney models a secularized and compassionate approach to the topic of suicide. It harshly critiques superstitious beliefs around suicide, as well as practices such as the staking and crossroads burial of the bodies of those who had killed themselves (both were legally sanctioned penalties for the crime of suicide until the mid-nineteenth century). Furthermore, Varney offers what it sees as an ideal clerical response to suicide or suicidality: one of compassionate care rather than condemnation and exclusion. Varney insists that readers approach the fraught topic of suicide with compassion for human (and vampire) suffering, with respect for individual agency and choice in death, and with disdain for fear-driven prejudice and persecution of suicidal individuals. Its legacy lives on, as subsequent vampire texts have continued to approach the topic of suicide and self-harm in the compassionate spirit of Varney the Vampire.

This essay seeks to reconfigure the disciplinary boundaries between English, Creative Writing and Heritage, through their shared commitment to place-making as a form of story-telling. Specifically, it argues for the inclusion of English in the group of disciplines collectively known as the “Creative Industries.” It aims to provide a toolkit for researchers and teachers working in or across these disciplines, helping to interrogate and collapse boundaries between them. To this end, the essay is structured in three parts: Museums, Literary Pilgrimage for Victorianists and Creative Writing. Each section includes case studies and creative responses, to open up new ways of researching and interpreting the literary text. The essay ends with a call to action, proposing the university campus itself as a site where students can create their own “Museum of ‘What if…’”

The second half of the nineteenth century was characterised by an unprecedented debate on foreign religions and systems of beliefs, epitomised by the fascination for Oriental wisdom. Thanks to the development of sinology, this came to include a growing interest in Chinese cultural traditions, such as Daoism; yet, such interest also engendered fears of reverse conversion, regarded as an especially insidious kind of “yellow peril,” not involving a military conquest, but a cultural one. Through the analysis of Alicia Little’s novel, A Marriage in China, this article investigates an instance of how the still tentative knowledge of Daoism was received and reframed in popular literature. On the one hand, some elements of the plot seem to reflect fears of cultural contamination; on the other hand, Little’s text also displays an intriguing curiosity for Chinese philosophy and religion, questioning instead some aspects of the Christian missionary movement. The novel thus recapitulates, in a popular form, some of the tensions underlying the Victorian encounter with Chinese culture.

Written and published alongside the proliferation of the period’s vaunted but contradictory ideology of mid-century liberalism, this article examines the overlooked aesthetic function of the Trollopean narrator. The narrator’s embodied and character-driven investment in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855) stands in contrast to the abstracted and impersonal attitudes of the realist novel and to the conflicting principles defined by mid-century liberalism, while commenting on the advent of the daily paper’s commercialism. The narrator’s provincial status enables a socially- informed take on the quaint township of Barchester, with its new reformist politics subsuming the life of the eponymous warden. Moreover, the novel’s satirical register—evident in the narrator’s characterizations of the mid-Victorian press; his review of media giant The Jupiter’s reportage of Barchester; and finally, his spoofing of popular literary culture, most notably the literary reinterpretations of contemporaries Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle—evince that Trollope’s solutions to mid-Victorian social and political issues lie less in reformist politics than they do in questions of aesthetics.

“Beauty and The Beetle” approaches Richard Marsh’s 1897 novel as a love story. As its antagonist, Marsh introduces the Beetle, a gender nonconforming, shape-shifting devotee of Isis come from Egypt to seek revenge on MP Paul Lessingham for a breach of romantic promise. The identity of the villain remains critically elusive, as scholars grapple with the complexities of categorical identities and the challenge of a hyper-sexual figure who is neither man nor woman. This article argues that the paradox of the Beetle’s identity is best resolved through an understanding of identity beyond a binary: that the Beetle actively self-identifies as both nonbinary and sexually active, and is capable of self-identification and romantic navigation in an imperialist, heteronormative binary culture. The horror of the novel is the social threat the Beetle poses, rather than violence: their ability to disrupt heteronormative domestic structures through their romantic overtures and expectations.

Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (1896), the focus of this article, is usually credited with starting the yoga renaissance in the late nineteenth century. The text marks a watershed moment in yoga history when Vivekananda translated and popularised the ancient Indian Yoga Sutras by the sage Patanjali as part of anti-colonial intercultural exchanges between east and west in the fin de siècle. The book’s transnational discourse drew from contemporary new physics and neo-Vedantic philosophy as well as Indian nationalism, pre-Freudian psychology, Western occultism, and modern ideas about physical health, and it issued a radical alternative to the binary oppositions on which imperialist and materialist ideologies rely. Vivekananda elucidates Patanjali’s yogic philosophy but, significantly, he also outlines a practical methodology for achieving Raja yoga’s goal of universal unity. He sets out a praxis that gradually breaks down the boundaries between mind and body, matter and energy, subject and object, and thereby transforms the individual in powerful and positive ways. It was an idealistic goal that appealed to various groups of unconventional heterodox thinkers at the fin de siècle, and it arguably contributed to the spiritual and political revolution that spread in subcultural forms, across Europe and America from the second half of the nineteenth century onward (Gandhi 2006: 121).

This article presents newly uncovered archival materials which necessitate a rewriting of the early life of Marie Corelli. The many biographies on her are focussed on rumours surrounding Corelli being illegitimate, her eccentricities, and the exposure of lies she told about her age. The most recent biographies, the latest of which was published in 1999, reformulated what had already been written about her and additionally employed analogue genealogical research methods to investigate Corelli’s parentage. They created an account of Corelli’s life which has been subsumed into twenty-first century scholarship. However, the digitisation of genealogical records, as well as of nineteenth and twentieth-century newspapers, has enabled research which renders the twentieth-century biographers’ findings inaccurate and incomplete. This article uncovers Corelli’s working-class origins; it reveals that she spent a lengthy period in America; it finds the likely location of the convent school she attended; and details that she had a fuller performing career than previously understood. It finds truth in the stories that Corelli told about herself, forcing a re-evaluation of her character and her motivation for the concealment of her early life, paving the way for future study.