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This essay explores the Victorian debate about the place of pockets in men's and women's clothing. By studying the representation of men as naturally pocketed creatures and the general denial of useful pockets to middle-class women, the essay demonstrates the tenacious cultural logic by which men's and women's pockets were imagined to correspond to sexual differences and to index access, or lack thereof, to public mobility and financial agency. Interconnected readings of visual art, essays, and novels show how the common sense about gendered pockets was utilized and promulgated in Victorian narratives. The question of who gets pockets is thus positioned as part of the history of gendered bodies in public space.

This essay examines the cultural representation of women's encounters on the fin-de-siècle street and, in particular, the uncertainties that clustered around the possibilities of mutual, or one-sided, same-sex desire accompanying such meetings. It argues, through an examination of lyric poetry, paintings, and short fiction, for the usefulness of twilight--a time of shadowy ambiguity--as a trope to suggest these uncertainities. More than this, it maintains that the lyric and the developing genre of the short story were modes ideally suited to an invocation of the fluid, the uncertain, and the unnamable. This argument is advanced through a close reading of Charlotte Mew's strange short story "Passed," which is read as representative of a transitional moment in lesbian literary history.

This article explores how Victorian notions of charity translated to evangelical mission projects in the Near East. Focusing on Quaker philanthropist Ann Mary Burgess, it traces the trade networks that she established to serve the Armenian community living in the Ottoman Empire. Burgess's vast network of supporters throughout Britain, Europe, and the Near East enabled her to fund relief projects using profits from goods produced by the orphans and widows served by the Friends' Constantinople Mission. The mapping of these networks reveals the evolving relationship between evangelicalism, the humanitarian movement, and the marketplace in imperial Britain.

This article looks first at how the art of J.W. Waterhouse responds to the classical world: how complex the scene of reception is, triangulated between artist, the ancient past, and his audiences, and extended over time. Second, it looks at how this scene of reception engages with a specific Victorian problematic about male sexuality and self-control. This is not just a question of Waterhouse using classics as an alibi for thinking about desire, but also of the interference of different models of desire and different knowledges of the classical world in the reception of the painting's narrative semantics.

Challenging entrenched preconceptions about the supposed escapism and conservatism of Edward Burne-Jones's art, this paper seeks to establish his monumental painted series, "The Legend of the Briar Rose," as a fundamentally radical and confrontational work. Critics have long viewed it as an endorsement of sleepy stasis, antithetical to the political activism espoused by his friend William Morris. By unraveling the intertwining themes of the series -- the transformative dream vision, artistic labor, the decorative mode, and social egalitarianism -- the "Briar Rose" series is revealed instead to be dramatization of the struggle for personal, social, artistic, and even environmental awakening.

James McNeill Whistler's painting "The White Girl (Symphony in White, No. 1)" caused a scandal for depicting a woman dressed all in white, uncontained by any clear framing narrative. Though the painting is usually read into history of modernism for its experimental play with tones of white, in fact the painting was linked by Victorian viewers to the mass-cultural phenomenon surrounding Wilkie Collins's sensation novel "The Woman in White." By examining the two works together, this article shows that the divide between the world of fine arts and that of sensational entertainment is perhaps more entrenched in our own canons than it was for Victorian spectators and consumers.

This essay focuses on the ways in which works by Robert Chambers, Charles Darwin, and George Eliot encouraged readers to imagine the future as contingent. But where Chambers alludes to Charles Babbage's computational engine and the period's life insurance industry to hint at the role of contingency in natural history, Darwin insists on the importance of contingently determined outcomes to speciation. The "Origin" consistently exercises the reader's speculative energies by generating conditional statements, causal hypotheses, adn diverging alternatives. "Adam Bede" constitutes its characters' interior lives around the proliferation of such contingent narratives. To reflect on the future or on the past, these works suggest, demands a temporal, moral, and narrative complexity in one's thinking.

From the 1800s onward, aesthetic critics attempted to free the study of ancient Greek art from the frameworks of institutional education and professionalized criticism. In this process, aestheticism entered an uneasy alliance with archaeology, a discipline that was likewise challenging traditional modes of classical learning practiced in public schools and the old universities. In "The Child in the Vatican" (1881), Vernon Lee -- writing under the influence of Pater and from a position of cosmopolitan female amateurism -- examines the uses of archaeological science in the study of classical art. Her analysis of the sculptures of the Niobe Group at once relies on the archaeological method and asks readers to doubt scientific approaches to art that dim the sublime power of the art object.

This essay examines the complex tangle of emotional and scientific attachments that linked Darwin and botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. Analyzing their roles as husbands, fathers, and novel readers demonstrates that possessing and expressing sympathy was as important for Victorian naturalists as it was for Victorian husbands. Sympathy was a scientific skill that Victorian naturalists regarded as necessary to fully understand the living world; although sympathy became increasingly gendered as feminine over the course of the century, its importance to male naturalists requires us to rethink the ways gender roles were negotiated in Victorian Britain. Botany was, for men like Darwin and Hooker, an acceptably masculine pursuit that nevertheless allowed--and even required--them to be sensitive and sympathetic.