Greetings from the Editor

Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature #137, Summer 2020, offers a variety of new scholarship, both on canonical writers—Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy—and on lesser known authors—Catherine Gore, Charlotte Riddell, and John Lockwood Kipling. Also featured in this issue are genre analyses, including silver-fork novels, ghost stories, and feminist gothic, as well as the poetry of authors who are better known as novelists. Topics range from the Victorian Gospel of Work to the rise of middle-class leisure activities, from the Miltonic underpinnings of Oscar Wilde’s writing to intersections linking folk-culture with literature, and from the sinking of the Titanic to the decline of the British Raj. Taken together, these discussions incorporate folk-superstitions with Victorian dualism, both anticipating the inevitable disruptions posed by modernism and postmodernism.

Tamara Wagner’s “‘Anything but business’: Middle-Class Work and Leisure in Catherine Gore’s Silver-Fork Fiction” provides revealing insights into one who was a best-selling author in her time but is today nearly forgotten. Wagner’s analysis re-evaluates “Gore’s multifaceted representation of the middle-class businessman” as a “seldom explored aspect in the cultural history of middle-class attitudes to work and leisure.” This welcome recuperation of a long-neglected chapter in Victorian literary history foregrounds Gore’s significant anticipation of the era’s signature novels-with-a-purpose. Before Dickens, before Gaskell, before Eliot, writers such as Catherine Gore were mapping out the defining qualities that ultimately distinguished the Victorian novel.

A number of lesser-known women writers contributed to another popular genre: ghost stories. Today termed feminist gothic, these stories emphasized characteristics not typically associated with haunting, fear, and terror. Foregrounded instead are generational connections and reparations, compassion and forgiveness. Anne DeLong’s “Haunted Children: Legitimacy, Inheritance, and the Sins of the Fathers in Ghost Stories by Victorian Women” investigates stories featuring child ghosts—“particularly haunting, especially when the spectral characters are themselves young, neglected, and in need of protection and nurturance.” DeLong examines three stories: Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story,” Charlotte Rid-dell’s “Walnut-Tree House,” and Margaret Oliphant’s “The Open Door.” Each story features a living child and a ghostly counterpart, with the “haunting children who were abused, mistreated, or abandoned” mirrored by the haunted children who, because they “are loved, protected, and nurtured,” are able to “extend sympathy and compassion to their spectral counterparts.” For DeLong, these stories constitute feminist gothic by “privileging companionship, empathy, and spirituality over the patriarchal values of respectability, wealth, and skepticism.” Here, living children persuade their adult caregivers to “alleviate the sufferings of the dispossessed, juvenile wraiths,” thus completing life’s unfinished business and allowing them to rest in peace.

A strikingly similar dynamic is revealed in Emily Brontë’s poetry. James Quinnell’s “‘The loved shall meet on its hearth again’: Haunting as Promise of Connection in the Writing of Emily Brontë” employs an early scene in Wuthering Heights to model this poetry analysis. In the novel, Lockwood reacts in terror when he feels the hand of Catherine’s ghost; in contrast, Heathcliff weeps piteously, begging her to return to his grieving heart. It is the latter reaction—love and longing—that characterizes Brontë’s various ghost-poems, illuminating the “differences between Lockwood’s clichéd response . . . and Heathcliff ’s frantic desire for reunion.” Seen through pre-Reformation concepts in which Purgatory is associated with connections linking the dead to the living, these poems depict ghosts who seek their eternal home—not in some mystical afterlife, but here on Earth, among their loved ones.

Shifting from the supernatural to the natural world, as seen through the conflicting lenses of folk-culture and modernist angst, Jude Wright’s “Public and Private Folklore: the Function of Folk-Culture in The Return of the Native and Jude The Obscure” explores Thomas Hardy’s existential despair through the “meaning-making” afforded by folklore. Wright interprets three poems, “Domicilium,” “The Convergence of the Twain” and “Ah, Are You Digging on my Grave,” as Hardy’s “attempts to impose some order on chance happenings” or “haps.” This foundation leads to an investigation...