Project MUSE®: Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USNo. 125 (2014) through current issueLatest Articles: Victorians: A Journal of Culture and LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature2475-67412166-0107Latest articles in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Race, Color, and the Victorians
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975893
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THE TOPICS THAT FALL UNDER the heading “race, color, and the Victorians” are vast, as was the range of Victorian thinking on the topics of race and color in fiction and non-fiction writing. As guest editor for this special issue of Victorians, I hope its readers will conceive of this issue as a snapshot. What we present here is a selection of some critical thinking about representing race in Victorian literature—primarily in novels but also stage writing and some nonfiction. Rather than attempting a comprehensive overview of any aspect of the field, this issue gathers essays on the topic of color and race to contribute to our collective considerations of critical race studies about and in the nineteenth
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmallIntroduction: Race, Color, and the Victorians2025-11-27text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Race, Color, and the Victorians2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®707482026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27“Ain’t I as Fair and White as You or You?”: Race, Performance, and Reverse Passing in Victorian Theatre
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975894
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IN THEIR INTRODUCTION to the special issue of Victorian Studies entitled “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong point to the irony that “a period and geographical center that consolidated a modern idea of race . . . lacks a robust account of race and racialization” (Chaterjee et al. 370). While their focus is on centering “racial logic” at the foundation of Victorian Studies’ “historical and theoretical frameworks” (370), one part of that work might be conceived as recovering Victorian theories, practices, and performances of “race and racialization.” Contemporary criticism has more often focused on the novel than on Victorian theatre to think through
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmall“Ain’t I as Fair and White as You or You?”: Race, Performance, and Reverse Passing in Victorian Theatre2025-11-27text/htmlen-US“Ain’t I as Fair and White as You or You?”: Race, Performance, and Reverse Passing in Victorian Theatre2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®1090412026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27“Black” Nabobs and “White” Baboos: Transimperial Intimacies and Fluidities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975895
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“BLACK” NABOBS AND “WHITE” baboos/babus1 are two prominent social groups who came into existence as a result of commercial and imperial contact between Britain and India in the long nineteenth century. The appearance of deracinated Britons and Indian mimic men in canonical nineteenth-century literature has received adequate critical attention; the nabob and baboo fictions that they owe their origin to, however, have been eclipsed with the passage of time. In Taming Cannibals: Race and Victorians, Patrick Brantlinger notes that characters such as Abel Magwitch from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness have become the representational models for the popular imperial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmall“Black” Nabobs and “White” Baboos: Transimperial Intimacies and Fluidities2025-11-27text/htmlen-US“Black” Nabobs and “White” Baboos: Transimperial Intimacies and Fluidities2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®993232026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27Color and Revolution in the Serialization of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975896
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CHARLES DICKENS’S A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1859) is overall a rather colorless novel. Many of the settings in both London and revolutionary-era Paris are presented as dreary, dark, and dirty—a far cry from Paris’s reputation as “the uncontested center of fashion” in the nineteenth century (Kalba 9). The adjective “dark” appears a whopping eighty-nine times; in contrast, “colour” is mentioned only sixteen times, sometimes in the negative, as in “no vestige of colour” to describe the complexion of the young seamstress waiting to be guillotined along with Sydney Carton in the final chapters (Dickens 263). What is colorful, however, is the context of the novel’s serialized publication in Dickens’s new periodical All the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmallColor and Revolution in the Serialization of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities2025-11-27text/htmlen-USColor and Revolution in the Serialization of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®1028492026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27Racial Ambiguity, Sexual Impurity, and Redemption in Braddon’s Aurora Floyd
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975897
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AURORA FLOYD IS A SENSATION NOVEL that troubles the boundaries of the bourgeois world in which eligible bachelors marry innocent, well-bred young women from the right kind of families, maintaining the stability of their class. Aurora Floyd tells the story of an upper-class milieu which is decidedly penetrable by those who marry in and change the nature of the aristocracy and the rising professional bourgeois class. The novel often describes Aurora in ways that classify her as an outsider, and her mother, Eliza Prodder, has class and racial origins that make her an outsider to the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world. Both Aurora and her mother are repeatedly associated not just with the working and middle class but with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmallRacial Ambiguity, Sexual Impurity, and Redemption in Braddon’s Aurora Floyd2025-11-27text/htmlen-USRacial Ambiguity, Sexual Impurity, and Redemption in Braddon’s Aurora Floyd2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®848972026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27Braddon’s Blonde Lucys: Aesthetic Forms, Color, and White Womanhood in Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975898
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THE HEGEMONIC IDEAL OF WHITE, MIDDLE-CLASS womanhood in Victorian England, the Angel in the House, positions the ideal Victorian woman within the domestic sphere, where she serves her husband and children with devotion all the while exhibiting angelic goodness and beauty—qualities that Coventry Patmore’s verse above depicts as co-constituted through images of fairness, radiance, and light. Patmore’s use of religious imagery to describe the ideal beauty of the angel-woman demonstrates the physiognomic belief that there is a cohesion, a seamless link, between external “loveliness” and internal qualities of morality and purity.1 While he aims to emphasize her celestial (not fleshly) beauty, he does clarify that her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmallBraddon’s Blonde Lucys: Aesthetic Forms, Color, and White Womanhood in Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret2025-11-27text/htmlen-USBraddon’s Blonde Lucys: Aesthetic Forms, Color, and White Womanhood in Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®874292026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27Tawny, Tyrannous Dr. Francia and Carlyle’s Confused South America
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975899
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Tal vez creyó que solo lo leerían los ingleses o que escribía para los habitantes de otro planeta. (Maybe he thought that only the English would read it, or that he was writing for the inhabitants of another planet.)IN HIS INITIALLY ANONYMOUS AND EVENTUALLY infamous 1849 article “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Thomas Carlyle fixates upon the idea of pumpkins. More specifically, he fixates on pumpkins in conjunction with emancipated Black people in the West Indies: . . far over the sea we have a few black persons rendered extremely ‘free’ indeed. Sitting yonder with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder and incisor teeth ready for every new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmallTawny, Tyrannous Dr. Francia and Carlyle’s Confused South America2025-11-27text/htmlen-USTawny, Tyrannous Dr. Francia and Carlyle’s Confused South America2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®1170972026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27Mary Seacole’s Double Duty
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975900
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THE PRESENT ESSAY IS A RESPONSE to ruminations that began when I assigned Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) in a British literature course that, due to an enrollment bottleneck partially caused by COVID-19, was tasked with meeting four different degree requirements instead of just two: undergraduate and graduate Major British Writers and undergraduate and graduate literary theory. The often humorous and always canny autobiographical Wonderful Adventures is probably best-known for its depictions of Seacole’s skilled doctoring during the Crimean War, but it also documents her travels in the Caribbean. While making my way through this farrago of a class I had designed, I was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmallMary Seacole’s Double Duty2025-11-27text/htmlen-USMary Seacole’s Double Duty2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®865222026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27Negotiating Identity: Creole Experiences in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975901
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MARY SEACOLE’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands stands as a testament to resilience, defiance, and cultural hybridity in the face of colonial oppression. Published in 1857, Seacole’s narrative chronicles her extraordinary life as a Jamaican nurse, entrepreneur, and traveler, offering a unique perspective on the intersecting forces of race, gender, and power in the nineteenth century. The significance of Seacole’s narrative, however, extends far beyond its initial publication, as it continues to resonate and evolve within contemporary political and social landscapes. Seacole’s narrative has been reimagined and repurposed across diverse contexts. The text explores the complexities of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/718/image/coversmallNegotiating Identity: Creole Experiences in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands2025-11-27text/htmlen-USNegotiating Identity: Creole Experiences in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands2025-11-272025TWOProject MUSE®737522026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-27