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The article explores the integral role played by servants and shopkeepers in Henry James' fiction of the late 1890s, arguing that this depiction of lower-class life indicates James's interest in consciousness. It demonstrates that these characters provide the protagonists a fixed scale by which to measure the growth of their own consciousness.

Henry James's 'The Papers' (1903) is found to be among the first works of fiction to identify changing conceptions of intimacy brought about by new communication technologies. A number of conversations involving unspoken intimacy intimate that the lesson of 'The Papers' is that intimacy with people one do not know is far easier to establish than intimacy with people one do know.

George Meredith's use of broken syntax or his explorations in Dot-and-Dashland is examined. His enchantment with the unarticulated and inarticulate, as well as his attitudes toward transcription is presented.

Herman Melville's essaying of narrative structure and symbol in 'Moby-Dick' is demonstrated by linking it to Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and Thomas Bangs Thorpe's 'The Big Bear of Arkansas'. It showed that Romance was a mode of writing that he adopted during a particular state in his creativity leading to the discovery of the relation of self and other as well as a strategy for reaching an audience.

The examination of English author's George Eliot's 1859 fictional novel 'The Lifted Veil' has triggered queries regarding its role in shaping Eliot's career as a writer because this is the first work in which she carefully takes on a first-person male persona. The association between one's gender and knowledge is important to the interpretation of the story in terms of medical science. Eliot's take portrays the error of pursuing 'Woman' as the representative of an unfathomable 'Other.'

George Meredith's 'The Egoist' resounds with Darwin's evolutionary concepts concerning the mating game and the rights of women. This explicit connection is evident in the story's focus on the physical and in the 'struggle between selfish and social instincts.' The story revolves around Clara Middleton's attempts to extricate herself from an engagement with Sir Willoughby Patterne, a baronet whose chief criteria for a bride were 'money, health and beauty.'

A look at the developmental structure of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Artist of the Beautiful,' may help to resolve the debate over whether Emersonian Transcendentalism or Romantic Idealism was the philosophical framework of the author's work. This new perspective reflects both the author's philosophical sophistication and reveals an analogy between the release of Owen Warland's butterfly and the 'reader's imagination from its rational, empirical confinement.'

Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Cousin Phillis' tells more than a woman's unrequited love for her first love. Her heroine, Phillis Holman, represents the predicament of educated women who mistakenly accept 'sexual and intellectual bondage for fulfillment and liberation.' Despite her unusual education, her roles are confined to daughter and lover while the men who teach her 'control her education in ways that serve their interests.'

Charles Kingsley and H.G. Wells contrast with most Victorian writers in their positive portrayal of machines. Machines assume a central role in Kingsley's 'The Water-Babies' and in Wells' 'The Time Machine' and 'The War of the Worlds.' These works also reflect a changing appreciation of machines. Kingsley emphasised a merging of the mechanical with the natural order for a greater good. He considered the benefit of machines as they existed in the Victorian Age. Wells considered future possibilities of machines through inventions.