Executive Committee of the Association: Officers--Kristine Garrigan, DePaul University, President; Susan Thach Dean, United States Naval Academy, Vice-President and President-Elect; Robert Koepp, Illinois College, Executive Secretary; Julie Melnyk, Central Methodist College, Treasurer; Keith Welsh, Webster University, Past Executive Secretary; Members-at-Large--Florence Boos, University of Iowa; William McKelvy, Washington University; Thomas Prasch, Washburn University; James Sack, University of Illinois-Chicago.

Victorian Endings is the theme chosen for the MVSA's Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting, to be held in Chicago, April 20-21, 2001, at Loyola University (Water Tower Center). Former MVSA Executive Secretary Micael Clarke of the Loyola English Department has agreed to serve as the local arrangements coordinator, and has already done a good deal of work to prepare for the conference. Tentative plans call for accommodation arrangements at the Senaca Hotel where a limited number of rooms will be held at a special rate until mid-March. Further information about the meeting, including plans for celebrating MVSA's 25^th year (not an ending at all, by any means, but a sign of continued vitality), will be forthcoming.

Victorian Endings is, of course, an appropriate theme to mark the centenary of Queen Victoria's death, the event which is arguably the most significant of Victorian endings. While the call for papers certainly invites proposals which deal in some way with Victoria's death and the end of the reign, the MVSA's conference program committee also encourages proposed papers which will treat other kinds of endings, loss, and change. Topics such as the passing of rural life and its values, attitudes toward dying, wills and final testaments, the close of political careers, loss of faith, divorce, the dissolution of friendships and other personal or professional relationships, endings in fiction, musical endings, personal or corporate bankruptcy, the fading of fashions, the waning of social or political movements, the deaths of other eminent Victorians--all of these and many other applications of the conference theme would be appropriate. The conference program should reflect, finally, the fact that interest in and treatment of endings of various kinds is recurrent throughout the Victorian period (and throughout Victorian studies), and is not just a matter of concern with the death of the Queen.

Because MVSA is an association of scholars representing a range of disciplinary interests in the culture of Victorian Britain, proposals from all fields are most welcome. Particularly encouraged are proposals which have multidisciplinary aspects or which have broad appeal across the disciplines. Proposals for panels will be considered, provided that abstracts from all panelists are submitted together. Panel proposals which offer the perspectives of two or more disciplines are especially welcome.

Proposals may be submitted by post, fax, or e-mail. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2000. All proposals--which should be no more than two double-spaced pages--as well as inquiries about this conference, should be directed to:

Robert Koepp
MVSA Executive Secretary English Department
Illinois College
Jacksonville, IL 62650

e-mail: rkoepp@hilltop.ic.edu
fax: (217) 245-3365

Victorian Realities/Victorian Dreams, the 2000 Annual Meeting, was held at the Illini Union of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, March 31-April 2. Those in attendance enjoyed a fine conference as usual, but were also treated to a wonderful musical experience, the performance of Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. Many thanks go to hosts Walter Arnstein and Nicholas Temperley for their fine efforts in making the local arrangements for this most successful meeting. Additional thanks to Nicholas who was instrumental in coordinating the School of Music's Gerontius performance with the MVSA program committee's other arrangements for the conference.

A Note from President Kris Garrigan:

As you will gather from all the good news reported here, this has been a fine year for MVSA. The annual meeting, our first three-day conference since Bloomington in 1996, was also one of the best attended in recent years. The highlight, of course was the rare presentation of Edward Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, spectacularly staged in the beautiful Krannert Center for the Performing Arts by the University of Illinois Oratorio Society, Chorale, and Symphony Orchestra. Former MVSA president Nicholas Temperley had sought for two decades to bring this wonderful project to fruition, and we owe him many thanks for his tenacious dedication in seeing it through, including securing funding and assembling an excellent panel to discuss Elgar and Newman. Thanks, too, to our other Urbana stalwart, our first president Walter Arnstein, for his invaluable help with local arrangements. Was he even responsible for the fine weather?

We in MVSA are proud of our longstanding support for graduate students, both in regularly welcoming them as presenters at our meetings and in awarding yearly the Arnstein Prize for an outstanding dissertation project. Happily, the Arnstein Fund is growing steadily, so that for 2001, the prize will be $1250. This latest increase has been made possible in part by the generous $500 donation of former MVSA executive secretary Dale Trela, who pledged an additional $500 if members would match his contribution during the Urbana meeting. In a gratifying burst of Victorian philanthropy, owing partly to the heretofore unrevealed talents of treasurer Julie Melnyk as a (literal) hat-passer, we had met, and surpassed, Dale's requirement by the end of Saturday's luncheon. How I enjoyed e-mailing him the following Monday to tell him to get out his checkbook again! Perhaps symbolically, it was Keith Welsh's battered baseball cap that Julie circulated so successfully, for he too has made a wonderful pledge to MVSA to underwrite for the next decade an annual prize of $100 to be awarded to the best graduate student presentation at the annual meeting. (See below his eloquently-defined criteria emphasizing teaching.) The prize is named in honor of Keith's friends, mentors, and professors at Indiana University, veteran MVSA members Mary and Bill Burgan, who have vowed to attend our 2001 meeting and present it in person. Thanks to both Dale and Keith for helping extend a well-established MVSA tradition.

Finally, MVSA depends on donations of time as well as money, and we're fortunate to have members who readily volunteer their services to set policy, read paper proposals, assist in meeting planning, and generally keep us going. Many thanks to departing Members-at-Large of the Executive Committee Lynette Felber (Indiana University/Purdue University-Ft. Wayne) and Judith Stoddart (Michigan State University) for their years of service, and welcome to their successors, Tom Prasch (Washburn University) and 1995 Arnstein Prize winner Bill McKelvy (Washington University).

See you at our Silver Anniversary meeting next year in Chicago!

Kris Garrigan

Treasurer Julie Melnyk reports that, "after paying bills for our excellent annual conference, we remain comfortably solvent with over $2800 in our interest-bearing checking account, thanks to generous support from sponsoring institutions. Even more cheering is the total endowment of the Arnstein Fund, which, benefitting from the Trela challenge and the generosity of MVSA members, stands at $17,659 and change. The goals set by the Executive Committee this April include increasing the dollar amount of the Arnstein Prize and moving toward fully endowing the award. We are well on our way: last year the interest on the Arnstein Fund totaled $753.21-and interest rates are rising. Three cheers for Alan Greenspan! Donations to the Arnstein Fund, like all contributions to MVSA, are tax-deductible: feel free to send a check anytime."

An added note here from the editor: MVSA members are encouraged to send in annual dues ($20.00, regular membership) as soon as possible in the new academic year. Look for a membership form at the end of this newsletter, or print a form off the MVSA website.

Founding Member Larry Poston has a project in the works to help us celebrate MVSA's 25^th anniversary: "a small souvenir volume that would include reminiscences from the earliest organizers and officers, as well as up-to-date reports from past winners of the Arnstein Prize on their careers, their ongoing research, and any other news of interest to fellow scholars." He invites current members and others who have had connections with MVSA in the past to contribute to this volume. For further information, contact Larry by e-mail at lsposton@uic.edu.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Walls, Ph.D. candidate in English at Texas Christian University, winner of the 2000 Arnstein Prize. Elizabeth's dissertation is titled "'The Prose and the Passion': The New Woman and Gender Politics in the British Novel, 1880-1930." Though she was unable to attend the Urbana-Champaign conference, she did send her thanks to MVSA, and provided a description/explanation of her project. The following are some excerpts from her statement of acceptance, which Arnstein Prize chair Susan Dean read to conference attendees on Elizabeth's behalf:

Shortly after Queen Victoria's death in 1901, New Woman fiction, having added its unique voice to the women's reform movement, was superceded by the advent of militant activity in women's suffrage. Commensurate with the rise of avant garde modernism and radical feminism, the New Woman novel was relegated to little more than a curious literary artifact representing the didactic art of Britain's "Victorian past." I argue, however, that in an effort to quell the threat of female militancy and autonomy in the twentieth century, modernists resurrected the anachronistic figure of the New Woman in their fictions, despite their public disapproval of Victorian artifice. Although modernist literati were responsible for creating some of the most innovative fiction of the twentieth century, they nonetheless rejected the militant feminist in their novels, opting instead for female protagonists imitative of the New Woman-that is, strong women who compromise with rather than reject patriarchy.

Materials related to New Woman authors figuring in my dissertation are housed in part at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas and the British Library in London. Over the course of the next year, I will travel to these sites to examine papers written by such New Woman novelists as Mary Cholmondeley, Mona Caird, Lucas Malet, George Egerton, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Sarah Grand, and Rhoda Broughton. Among these papers I will be looking for evidence substantiating my claim that the New Woman novelists conceived of their fictions as political rhetoric and that the modernists with whom they occasionally corresponded maintained a certain awareness of the specific ideologies espoused by the New Women. I also hope to travel to Princeton University to examine holdings in the J. Harlin O'Connell Collection.

. . . my dissertation is grounded in Victorian studies. The fact that my argument begins with an examination of the New Women, relies on New Woman texts to support the basic contentions in each chapter, and uses close readings of New Woman novels to comment on and inform my assertions about the gendered nature of modernism situates my dissertation foremost as a contribution to Victorian scholarship.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to underscore and enhance these observations through detailed research that would not be possible without the support of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association. It is my hope that the research done for this dissertation will further knowledge on the subject of the Victorian New Women and their relationship to literary modernism. Thank you for your generous support of this endeavor.

The Tenth Annual Arnstein Prize Competition: Application materials for the Arnstein Prize are now available from Prize Committee chair Susan Thach Dean. Susan urges all MVSA members to spread the word about this monetary award for dissertaion researchers. The 10^th Arnstein Prize, to be awarded at the 2001 Annual Meeting in Chicago, will be $1250. For further information, contact Susan by e-mail at deanst@usna.edu.

New for 2001: The Burgan Prize: As Kris Garrigan noted in her presidential remarks above, MVSA will be awarding a new $100 prize at the Annual Meeting in Chicago next spring. This prize has been established by a gift from Keith Welsh honoring his mentors Bill and Mary Burgan. The following is Keith's description of the Burgan Prize, with criteria for determining future recipients of the award:

As anyone who has ever attended a scholarly meeting knows, presenting solid scholarship is only half of our job. Too often, speakers do not take the time to rehearse their presentations; they rush through them, try to cram too much into the time allotted, do not present an argument structured so that their listeners can follow it, or fail to make effective use of their speaking voice and visual aids. In short, they do not consider their audience. This can be a particular problem at an interdisciplinary conference with an audience from diverse backgrounds.

The Burgan Prize for the Outstanding Presentation by a Graduate Student at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association Annual Meeting recognizes a graduate student who exemplifies the qualities of an excellent teacher as well as a capable scholar by giving a presentation that demonstrates "teacherly" qualities. Criteria include an unhurried, well-organized presentation that meets the time limits; good eye contact with the audience; effective use of visual and verbal aids (though visual aids are not a requirement); an obvious passion for the work presented; and grace in handling questions at the end. In short, the winner of the Burgan Prize should demonstrate promise as a teacher as well as a scholar.

The award is intended to honor two people who are admirable scholar/teachers in their own right, and who, during their distinguished service at Indiana University, always evidenced sincere care and concern for graduate students. Bill and Mary Burgan have long been mainstays of Victorian studies, and each has done significant interdisciplinary work. But in addition to being fine scholars and fine teachers, they are wonderful human beings.

Victorian Realities/Victorian Dreams:
the 24^th Annual Meeting of the MVSA

Urbana-Champaign, March 31-April 2

--Abstracts--

Session I: African Queens, Genies and Fetishes, and Waking Dreams

LeeAnn Richardson, "Dreams of Scientific Truth: Rider Haggard's Ethnographic Imagination"

The title of H. Rider Haggard's most famous novel, She: A History of Adventure (I 887), illustrates the generic alliance between ethnography and narrative, between science and fiction. Anyone familiar with its fantastical plot, involving a forgotten African city ruled for two thousand years by an ageless and despotic white woman, must wonder why Haggard would choose this title, when the title given to the abridged version of the novel would seem more accurate: She: A Romance of marvel and Mystery (1896). In its plot and its ideology, She represents a blend of social science (it is a history) and strange exotic encounters (it is an adventure). The context of emergent anthropological theories helps to account for some of the novel's strangeness. Indeed, this odd mixing of genres parallels the development of participant-observation as the accepted ethnographic methodology. This methodology, combining what James Clifford calls "intense personal experience and scientific analysis" (The Predicament of Culture 34), describes the sort of dialectic of adventure and history that permeates Haggard's She. She registers the concerns of the emerging ethnography methodologically (Haggard's narrative conforms to ethnographic methods and reproduces ethnographically sanctioned practices), and ideologically (Haggard intimates ethnography's "culture concept" and reproduces its contradictions).

Early anthropologists developed the concept of culture as a complex whole, a single system made up of many different parts. This theory of the complex whole leads to a dilemma, however, because of ethnography's dependence on the participant-observer methodology. Culture is invisible and is made visible only through its representation. So, ethnographers must "see" the unseen, read the unwritten. Like a scientist conducting a séance, however, the ethnographer must employ occult knowledge within a rationalist hermeneutic that privileges science and suspects spiritualism.

She enacts this problematic. Ayesha, the white queen of the Amahagger, has the uncanny sight of the accomplished ethnographer. An Amahagger tribesman asks Holly: "Are there none in your land who can see without eyes and hear without ears?" One could argue that this precisely is the task of the ethnographer-to "see" with extra-sensory perception, to use intuition, reason, and logic to see into the heart of things. By looking into a pan of still water, Ayesha can view what is happening in a particular time and place. Holly, convinced that it is an occult ability, is corrected by Ayesha: "it is no magic; that is a fiction of ignorance. There is no such thing as magic, though there is such a thing as a knowledge of the secrets of nature." In this book, there is always a scientific explanation for knowledge which seems to be beyond what is normal, a "rational" explanation for supernatural abilities.

This internal contradiction parallels the similar struggle between anomic desire and social control which inhabits the heart of the Victorian ethnographic imagination. The conception of the utterly unconstrained "savage" is countered by the image of the "savage" shackled by custom. In She, Ayesha's freedom and power are revealed to be constraining and incapacitating: the supposedly omnipotent queen desires only to be ruled by the right man. Both threatening and alluring in her power, Ayesha's political menace takes shape in her physical attractiveness. Like the uncivilized native who "needed" British civilization brought to him, Ayesha embodies both freedom from civilizing norms and the need to be subdued by them.

This conference talk will demonstrate how She enacts the problematics of anthropology in narrative form. The novel serves the same purpose as ethnography often did: it brings the exotic close, justifies the colonial enterprise, and endorses the British interpretation of native life.

Ruth Hoberman, "Genies, Amulets, and Commodification at the Turn of the Century"

"The world is a great mart ... where all things are for sale to him who bids the highest in the currency of our desires." So says Ayesha to Holly, in H. Rider Haggard's She, arguing that she will be able to conquer the world. Holly is not convinced, and in any case, her reasoning, he says would destroy all morality. But in fact Ayesha has described, quite accurately, the world of mass consumption at the end of the nineteenth century. "The process of commodification," Curtis Hinsley writes, rests "on the premise that at bottom everything is for sale and everyone has a price-that the world, no matter how bizarre, is reducible to cash terms."

The tension between Ayesha's delight in the protean nature of the capitalist economy and Holly's moral scruples underlies a host of late Victorian stories about magically charged objects. Capitalism, as Marshall Berman points out, thrives on flux-money changing hands, markets expanding, commodities multiplying and moving-a world, in Berman's words, where "everything that is solid melts into air." It is also a world where everything that is sold seems charged with power, the phenomenon Marx named commodity fetishism. Severed from their origins in human labor, the objects appear autonomous, desirable, full of "potency and mystery." Objects in countless late-Victorian stories act out this autonomy, often murderously, suggesting the moral threat posed when we grant objects too much power.

But I'm interested in one particular kind of magical object: the kind that grants wishes. The amulet or genie in such stories, offering its owner his "heart's desire," echoes the claim of consumer capitalism that we can find our heart's desire through the possession of objects. An object that grants wishes is, in fact, a kind of mis-en-abime of desire, offering a dream of infinite and unmediated consumption. This is the ultimate version of the all-embracing "mart" envisioned by Ayesha.

But for Holly, the dream would be a nightmare, as it was for many late-Victorian men who saw unbridled consumption as both morally dangerous and intrinsically gendered. From the mid-nineteenth century on, according to Rita Felski "women are portrayed as buying machines, driven by impulses beyond their control to squander money on the accumulation of ever more possessions." Amulets and genies who fulfill their owners' desires have long populated folk tales. But at the turn of the century these occult objects appear on a new scale, immersed in realistic settings that suggest their relevance to the emerging consumer culture. In my paper I examine the way that R. L. Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp" (1893), F. Anstey's The Brass Bottle (1900), W. W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw" (1902) and E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet (1905) depict the relationship between gender and excessive consumption. In the process I suggest that the fetishized objects depicted in these stories work to mask the contradictions implicit in late nineteenth century capitalism- its embrace of both open marketplace and moral stability- of exotic objects and racialist xenophobia; of a domesticity that involves leaving the home to shop, and a shopping that involves bringing objects steeped in other cultural contexts into the very heart of the family.

Kelly Searsmith, "The Sleeper Half-Awakened: Double Consciousness in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books"

That the Alice books were generically associated with the dream vision is evinced by the title for their original stage production: A Musical Dream Play, in Two Acts, for Children and Others (Christmas 1886, my emphasis). These fantasies-which Ruskin once criticized as an unconnected dream,-are indeed dream visions, although not of the predictably allegorical kind. The Alice books, relatively realistic depiction of dreaming self-consciously raises questions about the irrational nature of dreams and its relationship to the dreamer's socially reinforced sense of individual identity. Yet, despite the importance of the dream vision to the Alice books and the wide-ranging, interdisciplinary treatment of these works, practically no attention has been given to how Lewis Carroll's conception of dreams, affected what he envisioned through them or in what ways increasingly popular, rationalist accounts of dreams may have influenced contemporary readers, understandings of his fantasies.

Morton Cohen, in his recent biography of Carroll, notes that in constructing his modern dream visions Lewis Carroll was 'without the benefit of later 'scientific, work on dream interpretation,' no doubt referring to Freud and his disciples (224-225). I do not believe, however, that Cohen's assumption that Carroll must therefore have had only a revelatory model of dreams-based on classical, spiritualist, and (although Cohen does not mention it, we may suppose) Biblical accounts-is accurate. By the mid-nineteenth century in England, several influential studies on the nature of dreams and their relationship to the cognitive processes of healthy and diseased minds and bodies had already been written. Those of the 1830s and 40s were especially conscious of having to undermine millennia of what they took to be superstition. By the 1860s, a rational theory of dreams was likely to have been nearly as widely accepted among the educated and middle-class of the Victorian era as it is today. Scholars who have ahistorically imposed Freudian readings upon the Alice books, mainly through focusing on the narratives sublimation and regression, have missed an opportunity to achieve a better understanding of the crucial role period psychology had in shaping them.

Dissatisfied with the strained psychoanalyzing of the Alices, Julian Wolfreys calls for critics to treat the tales, dream frames as "moments of textual play," rather than as "structural-interpretive indicators" (45). Like Wolfreys, I eschew an analysis that psychologizes Alice, choosing instead to read the tale's treatment of identity formation discursively and within its socio-historical context. Unlike Wolfreys, I find the dream vision to be central to the Alice books, interpretation, especially when dreams are understood in the rational terms established by such Carroll contemporaries as Robert Macnish, Henry Holland, A. L. Wigan, and John Addington Symonds.

More specifically, my essay argues that Carroll embraced the potential of dream-states to buffer society's power to determine individual identity. In the Alice books, the problem of identity is that to be socially named and placed is to be fixed, powerless, easily judged and reduced. Carroll's spatial representation of childish dream consciousness suggests a resistance to this determinism. Wonderland conveys that individuals have a "country' within that is privately defined, an interior space that is not only self-constituted but also constitutes the self. Yet, Carroll was clearly troubled by the sense that without losing oneself in madness (and perhaps even not then), maturing and mature consciousness cannot be entirely self-determined, free to accept oneself or others without intrusive value judgments. He resolved this problem through conceptualizing the successful resister as one who achieves and works to maintain a dynamic double-consciousness.

In Sleep and Dreams (1851), Symonds metaphorically represented the doubly-conscious individual as a newly wakened dreamer who superimposes upon the world the dream from which he or she cannot fully awake. In Alice's Adventures and elsewhere, Lewis Carroll appropriates whatever of Symonds's mad wakened dreamer may have been present in popular culture as the basis for a more appealing figure of double-consciousness: the waking individual who moves through life as if half in a dream. Carroll invested his waking dreamer with the power to perceive the rational and the absurd simultaneously. For Carroll, a doubled perspective enabled one to entertain the irrational while recognizing its unreality; at the same time, it permitted one to acknowledge the fixed nature of the real, while entertaining its absurdities. The double-consciousness Carroll offered readers admitted both perspectives: a vision of the world through the romanticizing, golden lens of childish leisure, pleasure, and play as well through the estranging, satirical filter of Wonderland's cognate absurdities.

Session II: Social Reform: Dreams and Discrepancies

Lynn Alexander, "Pictures of Adversity: Portrayals of Sweated Labor at Century's End"

The aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal "solutions" to unresolvable social contradictions.

--Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

The last three decades of the nineteenth century are generally recognized as radically different socially, politically, and aesthetically from those of the mid-century, with many historians seeing 1866 as a turning point. That year for the fourth, and last, time in the nineteenth century there was a major cholera outbreak, which killed more than fifteen thousand people. It was followed by a harsh winter which drove the poor and unemployed onto the streets in protest, and made the destitute and homeless more visible. Earlier that year, discussion concerning the Second Reform Act had begun, and a meeting of the Reform League in Hyde Park grew heated enough to be labeled "a riot." Although the clash was unusual, discussion concerning the Act tended to be heated since its passage in August 1867 added large numbers of urban laborers to the electorate. Establishing the principle, though not the practice, of universal manhood suffrage, the Act was viewed as "a leap in the dark," with the widespread conviction that political power was shifting from a responsible few to what Walter Bagehot described, in his introduction to the second edition of The English Constitution (1867), as an "ignorant multitude."

Another event, early in 1866, changed the way journalists investigated questions concerning the poor, and the way the stories about the poor were told. Dressing himself in shabby clothes, James Greenwood spent a night in the casual ward of a London workhouse. His account of his evening first appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, then was reprinted in the Times, and finally published as a pamphlet, A Night in a Workhouse. Not only did Greenwood's expos6 initiate a standard for investigative reporting of conditions among the urban poor, but the stark reporting established a tone picked up by working-class writers such as Arthur Morrison later in the century. Catherine Gallagher insists that the "reshaping" of social realism in the 1860s resulted from "stressing the necessary discontinuity between facts and values.,, often described as "somber or disillusioned," these later works of social realism lack "a certain optimism and naivet6l' typical of earlier social protest literature (Gallagher 266). Such realism also affected periodical publications. While Punch had moved away from its early radical stance, in December 1869 W.L. Thomas founded the Graphic, a journal which soon became known for its social realism, especially in its engravings. Using a single full-scale engraving, such as Luke Fides's "Houseless and Hungry" (1869) or Hubert von Herkomer's "Christmas in a Workhouse" (1876), the Graphic "captured the complex social and artistic mood" of the period with "stunning accuracy" (Keating 129).

Throughout the final decades of the Victorian age and the beginning of the Edwardian era, reformers attempted to bring the problems of sweated workers before the public. One of the ways was through visual representation. Paintings by their very nature objectify; the object portrayed is transformed from the actual to an image allowing viewers to mentally and emotionally distance themselves from the horrors portrayed. But the gaze is not simply an act of vision; it is an ideological arena that encloses and dramatizes power relationships, both of class and gender. Thus, it becomes significant that the majority of patrons viewing such works would be middle-and upper-class men. In terms of class, the working poor were conceived of as foreign beings whose lives were curiously different, and paintings whose settings or implied narratives demonstrated the abject poverty of the working classes reinforced the sense of otherness. In terms of gender, the gaze becomes representative of male dominance, as Laura Mulvey terms it, scopophilic: finding "pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object," and containing a strong element of male voyeurism emphasizing a "woman's to-be-looked-at-ness." In terms of both class and gender the gaze is patriarchal, reflecting the power relations of the culture.

The victory of the Liberal government in 1906 and the establishment of the a parliamentary commission in 1907 to oversee the sweated trades, combined with the 1906 Daily News Sweated Industries Exhibition, may have suggested that the Edwardian age would bring remediation and a new respect for workers. Yet even as the Daily News exhibition opened, the photos in its catalog, showing neat, orderly interiors and clean, industrious workers, were labeled as "realistic, lying photographs" by reviewers for other papers (Suthers 5). Perhaps realizing that the exhibition of the working classes had been transformed from an educational opportunity into a "social function" (Gavin-Duffy 744), a pleasurable spectacle rather than an informative documentation of working-class labor, the editor of the Daily News lamented that for many viewers the exhibition was little more than "a painful interlude between a visit to the shops in the morning and a visit to the theatre in the evening" (Gardiner xv). Decades of exposure, in illustrations and fiction and art, had blurred the lines demarking reality and fiction to the extent that even real workers, when exhibited for public view, seemed to be little more than players upon stage and reduced their labor to entertainment.

In my presentation I will focus primarily on the works of Claude Calthrop's ("It's not linen you're wearing out, / But human creatures, lives"), Herbert von Herkomer ("Old Age--A Study of the Westminster Union" and "Eventide: Westminster Union"), and Thomas B. Kennington ("Adversity," "Widowed and Fatherless," "Relaxation," "The Workroom." I will show slides as well as discuss the works.

Thomas Prasch, "Medieval Dreams and Socialist Hopes: Time and Crisis in William Morris's Dream of John Ball (1886-87)"

In the mid-to later 1880s, his most actively socialist period, William Morris repeatedly re-engaged with the medieval era that had been such a hallmark of his earlier writings, the Arthurian fantasies dating to his association with the Pre-Rapahelite Brotherhood, and that had provided a source for much of his arts-and-craft production in the 1860s and 1870s. Medievalism, however, is repositioned in a strikingly different way in the socialist late prose romances, however, with far more attention to conditions of labor and to the earlier phases of broader economic transformations that would culminate with industrialization in Britain (and the corresponding abandonment of the more fanciful--and elitist-medievalism of his earlier work. Nowhere is the difference more clear than in The Dream of John Ball, originally published in Morris's socialist journal Commonwealth, which, focusing on the moment of greatest crisis in late medieval society, the so-called Peasant Rebellion (really a far wider eruption of discontent) of 1381, reconceives the medieval world in terms far darker even than, for example, the medievalized utopianism of News from Nowhere . Of particular interest in Dream is Morris's -treatment of time -itself: a time-traveler plot-wedded to a philosophical engagement with notions of dialectical change and historical inevitability marking Morris's engagement with the writings of Marx. The connections between Morris's conceptions of historical change in Dream have been noted before, most notably by E. P. Thompson. Also part of Morris's business here, however, is, to play on one of Thompson's titles, the making of an English working past: the securing for socialist use of a pantheon of specifically English forebears, a tradition of resistance that would feed into, for example, seventeenth-century radicalism, and that would, in a sense, make Morris's own socialism inevitable. This sense of a necessary linkage to past traditions of resistance becomes clearest in the Dream's final chapters, in the discussion between the fourteenth century radical preacher John Ball and the visitor from the future, outlining a future that would entail Ball's immediate defeat but the longer term victory of his cause. These dynamics will be the themes I explore in this paper.

Valerie Johnson, "'Matter Out of Place': The Destabilizing Realities of the Victorian Sanitary Project"

In response to repeated cholera epidemics, terrifying social documentaries of urban life, and overcrowded Victorian cities, bourgeois Victorians diligently distributed sanitary tracts to the working classes, established Public Health boards to investigate underclass homes, and modeled hygienic rituals for the socially disadvantaged. While some reformers earnestly aspired to deter the spread of disease and improve the poor's quality of life, theorists Peter Stallybrass, Allon White, and Anne McClintock agree that the major cultural significance of Victorian cleanliness was its potential for patrolling social position and personal identity--of vital importance in an era of shifting, precarious boundaries. In my paper, I'll challenge this reading of the functions of cleanliness and the Victorian sanitary project. Namely, I will contend that, in some instances, the nineteenth-century sanitary campaign did not fortify personal and social borders. Instead, cleanliness empowered certain cultural, racial, and socioeconomic Others to transgress social boundaries by enabling them to feel or appear threateningly similar to the dominant group. The bourgeois dream of preserving social and personal perimeters through sanitation proves to be highly problematic, and anything but tidy.

I'll turn to nineteenth-century cultural and literary texts to buttress my claim. First, by comparatively reading tracts published by the Ladies' Sanitary Association and the Metropolitan Working Classes' Association, I will demonstrate that middle-class Victorians stressed cleanliness as a discipline, while working-class writers emphasized the luxuries, freedoms, and pleasures it offered. In particular, the documents of the Metropolitan Working Classes' Association promise soap's power to refine and dignify the working class, implying that cleanliness promotes working-class equality with the bourgeoisie. Not only did the sanitary movement provide the working classes with the rhetorical means to assert social equality, but in the event that socioeconomic Others espoused bourgeois doctrines of hygiene, the freshly-scrubbed products of the campaign threatened to pass as middle-class, significantly troubling the boundaries of social class. The life of servant Hannah Cullwick serves as a fascinating historical example of such border dissolution, while Heathcliff of Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Mary Cotton of Eliza Meteyard's "The Derby Babies" further demonstrate the transgressive power of cleanliness. As part of these character studies, my paper will contemplate Homi Bhabha's argument that colonizers continually impose their own identities and cultural standards upon colonized people, expecting them to imitate the model set before them, yet become alarmed if the Others mirror back their own images too successfully. I see a comparable mimicry process at work in the Victorian sanitary crusade, but in terms of social class. When members of the underclasses adopt sanitary practices and threaten to pass for bourgeoisie, the middle-class performs several compensatory measures, such as mocking the inadequacy of the working-class parties' ablutions, stressing their ongoing dependence on bourgeois supervision and tutelage, or raising hygienic standards another notch. Ironically, the realities of the sanitary project become a bad dream for many bourgeois Victorians.

Session III: Victorian Imaging, Ideal and Real

Mary Ann Steggles, "The Victorian Reality and Dream of Empire"

Empire was a state of mind for the Victorians. It gave them not only a sense of pride but also a sense of identity enhancing popular opinion that their Empire was both wanted and just.

The situation on the India subcontinent, however, proved with the Uprisings of 1857-58 that this was not the case. The continuing call for swarteji, or freedom from British rule, begun in the late 1800s continued. The most public appearance of British dominion on the Indian subcontinent came in the form of the public monument. These civic statues not only embraced British ideology but were also a means of self-promotion, of themselves and of native rulers who sought their security in British rule. They were symbols of the dominant ideology erected within the public realm. As such, they embodied the dreams of Victorians--of a rule that was welcome, trusted, and continuing. Queen Victoria was the ultimate symbol of British rule on the Indian subcontinent. She embodied the ideals of just governance and of maternal love. Her effigy was celebrated in no less than forty public statues for the Indian subcontinent, images that celebrated the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British crown, her jubilees, as well as her death. The myriad of public speeches and gala unveiling ceremonies spoke to the dreams of the Victorians. The iconoclasm directed towards these symbols of British dominion, pride, and governance underlined another reality.

This paper will address the complex issues involved in civic statuary exported by the British to the Indian subcontinent, particularly during the reign of Queen Victoria and into the beginning of the twentieth century. It will underscore, through the use of images and statements made during these unveiling ceremonies, the unsubstantiated view of the British that theirs was a welcome governance. Discussion surrounding iconoclasm will underscore the reality of the Victorian's dream on the subcontinent.

Daniel Yezbick, "View Masters: the Coercive Vision of Victorian Stereoscopic Views"

As a toy for bourgeois dalliance or as a pedagogical device, the stereoscopic view (as both a noun and a verb) fascinated millions "through its strong impression of reality" that "elevates the viewer to a high level of-interest in the pictured situation." As popular "philosophical, scientific, and technological discourses" converged on the practice of stereoscopy and stereoscopic photography, international photographic conglomerates like Underwood and Underwood and the Keystone View company capitalized on the peculiar aesthetic novelty of the stereoscope's intimately perceived, artificial depth. As doubly theatrical dramas, narrative stereo views literally played themselves out upon the uniquely artificial perspective stage spaces produced through stereoscopy. As serialized narrative fragments, these dramatic bits of "pre-cinema" also infiltrated supposedly documentary genres like travel catalogues and educational series on history and geography. The resulting spectacles of replicated reality within illusionary spaces signified a powerful new type of radical vision that marked stereo viewing as an almost transcendental, revelatory experience for the Victorian viewer. At the same time, the tawdry physical quality of the cards themselves continually reflects their status as mass-produced trifles that ameliorate the cultural anxieties of their principal consumers. As meticulously composed, cheaply produced sequential stories surrounding upper middle class lifestyles and perspectives, theatrical stereoscopy profoundly expresses photography's role in the artistic reiteration of the nineteenth-century mind.

As a radical influence on photohistory, and as the central product of an industry capable of manufacturing over 5,000 cards per day, the stereograph's uniquely "solid" reconstruction of three-dimensional dramatic space remains rich in aesthetic and historical meaning. Although art historians occasionally acknowledge the importance of stereography, the full meaning of stereo viewing in Victorian society remains poorly explored. As masters of stereoscopic terrains, parlor-bound spectators could quite literally survey the world and conclude that all was as beautiful, superficial, and inferior as it should be. My paper will analyze the levels of artifice and theatricality apparent in the production of narrative stereoscopic views. Produced and sold as sequential stories, these texts offer substantial insight into the cultural politics of Victorian vision and fantasy. From decorous marriage stories to more ribald "chambermaid" dramas, these highly stylized, carefully composed image sequences profoundly express photography's role in emphasizing bourgeois sensibilities. I also plan to draw heavily on the unique role of the stereoscopic image as an obviously artful reconstruction of reality and the possible cultural politics imbedded in such a device. I also hope to illustrate my paper/presentation with a variety of sample images from a wide variety of stereographic sequences.

Marie Fitzwilliam, "Ashes and Weeds: The Mourning of Lost Dreams in The Claverings, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister"

In an oeuvre dotted with strong-minded women whose choices lead to disastrous mistakes in love (Clara Amedroz in The Belton Estate, Alice Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her?, and Julia Brabazon of The Claverings to name but a few), Anthony Trollope expertly exposes the pathology of dreams and their disappointing reality. Several of his novels investigate what widowed Lady Ongar née Julia Brabazon says so eloquently: that the beautiful prize once won turns out to be no better than "ashes between the teeth."

This paper will explore how Trollope's chronicle of dreams and their ugly reality is nowhere so compelling as when he considers them through the widow's proverbial ashes and weeds. In Lady Ongar (The Claverings), Emily Lopez (The Prime Minister) and, to a lesser extent, Lady Laura Kennedy (Phineas Finn ), Trollope describes women who adopt extreme conventions of widowhood ostensibly out of dutiful respect for their late husbands. In fact, their orgy of mourning signifies an unspeakable anger at themselves for dreams conceived in stubborn ignorance or innocence. Long before widowhood, Ladies Ongar and Kennedy recognize that they have squandered chances at true love and marital bliss in pursuit of money and status, while Emily Lopez learns that her choice of a husband was clouded by rebellion against good counsel. Only with the advent of widowhood, however, are all three women able to vent their profound disappointment at the hand they have dealt themselves.

This paper will of course discuss the protagonists' dreams, but will focus more heavily on how the reality of these dreams manifests itself in the women's costume. Because by custom widows' weeds publicly represent through eye-catching spectacle the end to dreams of love and security, they are a rich area for discussing the intersection of purported and real loss. In their own way, they are unstable markers, simultaneously reliable and unreliable fabrications. Widows' elaborately ponderous veils, crepes, and bombazines, rather like Victorian biography, appear to eulogize the dead through showy detail. However, the substance does not always supply accuracy, and the spectacle conceals truth rather than reveals it. With the help of fashion historians John Morley, Phyllis Cunnington, and Catherine Lucas, as well as social historian Pat Jalland, this paper will demonstrate that Trollope could employ the garments, the fabrics, the colors of widows' costume as ironic subtext because the etiquette of mourning was writ large in the lives of his middle- and upper-class audience. They were able to read the fabric text and, at Trollope's prompting, notice the subversive use to which it was put. Mourning there surely was, but for whom or what?

Session IV: Physical Pain/Spiritual Health

John R. Reed, "Pain Before Dying and Pain After Death in Newman's 'The Dream of Gerontius'

A modern reader might be surprised upon reading John Henry Newman's "The Dream of Gerontius" to discover so little reference to pain before death in a poem about the experience of dying. There is sufficient reference to the pain of suffering after death as the cleansing procedure for the soul, but only modest discussion of physical pain preceding death. And yet, both in Newman's own writing, and in other writings of the time, the pain associated with death was a central subject. Newman's historical novel, Callista, deals at length with martyrdom. The physical pain associated with martyrdom was what assured immediate translation to heaven for the martyr and accounted for the great admiration accorded to martyrs, especially in the Roman Catholic religion. It is surprising, then, that physical pain plays so small an evident part in "The Dream of Gerontius."

In my paper I will examine the way in which the body's pain before death and soul's pain after death operate overtly and implicitly in Newman's poem, but I shall do so largely through reference to other writings of the time, especially through the very popular book by James Hinton entitled The Mystery of Pain:: A Book for the Sorrowful. In this work, Hinton lays out programmatically and in simple language, the justification for physical pain, including the pain associated with death. He attempts to reconcile Christian faith with suffering, and to align a merciful God with widespread human agony. Using Hinton's direct discourse about pain, I shall indicate how Newman implicitly assumes some of the same attitudes.

Just as I shall use Hinton to illuminate Newman's attitude toward physical pain, I shall use F. D. Maurice's Theological Essays to illuminate Newman's views on pain after death. During the mid-Victorian period, there was a substantial argument about the nature of punishment in the afterlife whether there was a hell or merely a spiritually uncomfortable condition of loss and absence from God. Newman's treatment of pain after death in "Gerontius" can be viewed in the context of that argument.

Ultimately, I intend to demonstrate that Newman purposely diminished the role of physical pain and emphasized that of spiritual pain to render a particular view about the nature of human existence and especially the process of dying, a view that assumes an ascending progress in human nature from the beast-like to the angelic, a progress made explicit in the poem itself.

Claire Marie-Peterson, "The Dream of Female Intellect in Hypatia and Callista"

In 1853, Charles Kingsley published Hypatia: New Foes with an Old Face, in which he imagines, with great attention to historical background, the murder of the neo-Platonist philosopher Hypatia by a mob of rabid monks in fifth-century Alexandria. As the subtitle would indicate, this dream of right intellect undone by religious fanaticism is aimed as much at Victorian Roman Catholics as at their fifth-century coreligionists. Nor did the blow go unnoticed. In 1856, John Henry Newman, champion of Roman Catholics contemporary and historical, responded with Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century, in which he imagines the plight of a Greek artist and convert to Christianity who dies on the rack at the hands of a mob of rabid pagans. As Susan Dorman noted as early as 1979, this skirmish between Newman and Kingsley in the arena of fiction forecasts the public controversy between the two theologians that would erupt eight years later in nonfiction prose.

What has not been noticed is the role of gender in these two dreams of intellect undone. Since, in 1848, Kingsley had been instrumental in founding Queen's College, Harley Street, the first institution of higher learning for women in England, one might expect to see some celebration of female intellect in this novel published five years later. But in reality one sees very little such celebration. As one would expect, the asceticism, and particularly the celibacy, of fifth-century monastic life comes under attack in Hypatia. Even so, pagan worldliness is also severely criticized. The corrupt sensuality of paganism is at first assigned to the courtesan Pelagia, Hypatia's rival and opposite, while the cerebral philosopher herself seems heroic by contrast, particularly because the informed reader anticipates from the beginning her historical martyrdom at the hands of the monks. But in the event, Hypatia, like the similarly gifted Argemone in Kingsley's 1851 novel Yeast, fails because, as is asserted in an authorial comment about the latter character, she attempts to stand on "the false, masculine ground of intellect." Pelagia, by contrast, is ultimately redeemed, despite her worldliness and intellectual limitations, because she has a good heart. It is a good heart, rather than a right mind, that constitutes spiritual health for female characters in the novel.

In Callista, the title character displays, even as a pagan, both the freedom from sensuality and the intellectual receptivity that one might expect from the heroine of a novel by Newman, a celibate theologian and theorist of higher education as "Its Own End." Juba, the brother of Callista's Christian admirer, exemplifies, by contrast, the skepticism and sensuality of paganism. Curiously, Juba's paganism is not the patriarchal religion of the Greek and Roman pantheon but the more ancient, matriarchal, chthonic religion preceding it. First under the influence of his mother, the witch Gurta, and later literally possessed by an evil spirit, Juba worships a natural deity in a dark cave in the woods. Callista's intellectual receptivity ultimately results in her conversion. But her conversion results immediately in her death at the hands of superstitious pagans who believe that the presence of Christians among them has caused locusts to plague their agricultural community. Intellectual power is finally ascribed to Callista's would-be lover, the ultimately celibate Agellius, who first effects her conversion and then survives to spread the gospel after the pagan attack during which Callista is martyred. Callista's power is literally in her dead body, which miraculously "heals" Juba by freeing him from the evil spirit--though not coincidentally from his wits as well.

These two novels demonstrate that whatever their differences in other respects, Kingsley's Christian Socialism and Newman's Catholicism both turn on a Platonic dualism between mind and body that associates the former with masculinity and the latter with femininity, even though the ostensible contrast in both novels is the more flattering one that celebrates feminine spirit over masculine mind. Newman forthrightly condemns the sensuality that he associates both with the feminine and with the earth, and celebrates asceticism, available to women as well as to men, but also intellect, to which women in the novel aspire only at their peril. Kingsley's Christian Socialism condemns asceticism and celebrates physical pleasure, figuring married love as the perfect synthesis of the physical and the spiritual. But the pinnacle of heroism in Kingsley's scheme, tellingly denominated "Muscular Christianity," is not readily available to women, not because women' aren't physical enough, but because the body must ultimately be transcended by the intellect, and it is so transcended in the novel only by males. Ultimately, both novels dream the exemplary failure of female intellect.

Jude V. Nixon, "'To feed upon myself': The Stress of Self in Newman's 'Gerontius' and Hopkins's 'Carrion Comfort'"

This essay explores the spiritual and psychological crises the speakers in Newman's verse-drama "The Dream of Gerontius" and Hopkins's dark sonnet "Carrion Comfort" wage against self-redefinition and self-annihilation, that "brooding sense," says Robert Alter, "of the terrible imminence of the End" ("Apocalyptic Temper" 61), the "fearful ... anticipatory assimilation of that unanticipated entirely-other" (Derrida, "No Apocalypse" 23). While to Newman recovery comes through purgatorial fire/water and an apocalyptic dream announcing a non-linear understanding of time--fractal, turbulent, relative, and subjectivist, flowing "not ... as people think it does" (Michel Serres, Conversations 6 I)--to Hopkins the answer seems to lie in similar apocalyptic strategy, the winnowing/harvesting image in the poem, itself an apocalyptic trope, wherein the self is reconstituted. The experience of a "strange innermost abandonment," Gerontius realizes, is as though "my very being has given way, / As though I was no more a substance now," but a mere shade confronting "utter nothingness." Gerontius thus rouses his "fainting" soul to "play the man." "Carrion Comfort," a poem "written in blood," portrays a character moving from passive acceptance of his fate to actively fighting despair and determined not to yield. The octave exploits Gerontius's despair, negations, collapse of self, and taunting gestures of the adversary, despair. Like "Gerontius," "Carrion Comfort" concerns a despondency that can lead to the disintegration of the self, the dreaded disentangling of "these last strands of man / In me." The speaker's nightmarish world is one Hopkins himself experienced, "a nervous collapse," he calls it, "as when one is very tired and holding oneself at stress not to sleep yet/ suddenly goes slack and seems to fall and wakes, only on a greater scale and with a loss of muscular control reaching more less deep.... It made me think that this was how the souls in hell would be imprisoned in their bodies as in prisons" (Journals 238). The speaker in "Carrion Comfort" confronts a similar 'sense of an ending," an unraveling of his being, but embraces the doctrinal certitude that he is instressed with God's grace, that God "hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh." Gerontius expresses similar loss of bodily control ("Nor power to move thyself, nor limbs to move") and admits similar connectedness: "That each particular organ holds its place / As heretofore, combining with the rest / Into one symmetry, that wraps me round, / And makes me man."

The return of "That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain," raises yet another point of convergence between Gerontius and the Hopkins persona-their joint advocacy of intellectual pain, far more traumatic than actual physical suffering. Newman posits this idea in his sermon "Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion" (I 849), which Hopkins read on 9 April 1872 during his philosophate at Stonyhurst. Christ's agony, "a pain of the soul, not of the body," Newman reasons, was the initial act of his great sacrifice. "It was not the body that suffered, but the soul in the body"; and the greater the consciousness, the more intense the pain, hence Gerontius is granted "lower measures of perception" as a sign of mercy. Christ's passion, then, was most intense because his soul was "so fully directed upon the pain, so utterly surrendered, so simply subjected to the suffering." Absence of pain, on the other hand, is evident when there is &'no kind of inward sensibility or spirit to be the seat of it." Gerontius calls his suffering 6 1 something too of sternness and of pain," and the Angel informs him that "the face of the Incarnate God / Shall smite thee with that keen and subtle pain ... / And yet withal it will the wound provoke, / And aggravate and widen it the more." He experiences the negation and slackening, unstressing, of the very energy that should preserve his inscape, the stress that 4 4 makes me man." Like Byron's Manfred, he envisions himself as on some precipitous cliff looking down, or worse yet plunging headlong into unbounded emptiness. Even worse is the fear, the delirium, that takes hold of the inner recesses of the soul which assumes wings only to mock the soul's descent.

I intend to show the mentoring relationship Newman had with Hopkins, beginning with Hopkins's reception into the Catholic Church and Newman's advisory role in the religious order Hopkins would choose and the career moves he would make. Not surprisingly, Hopkins's fellow Balliol student, Martin Geldart, in a witty satire of Balliol life during this period, entitled A Son of Belial, links Hopkins, my "Ritualistic friend," Geldart calls him, directly to Newman and the vestiges of Tractarianism still evident at Oxford: "Gerontius Manley and I had many talks on religion. He was quite at one with me on the hollowness of Protestant orthodoxy, but he had a simple remedy-the authority of the Church. The right of private judgment must in the long run inevitably lead to Rationalism." Geldart agreed with Hopkins that the "Rome-ward movement" at Oxford was "not a question between two rival authorities," but, rather, one between "authority and private judgment" (I 67-70). And is the phrase, "son of Belial," a veiled reference to some unnatural sexual proclivity, perhaps homosexuality, the way Newman himself employed it to denounce the orgies that took place at his college on Trinity Monday, especially when on the previous day many had "pledged ... at His Table" (Letters 1:66). Exploring, then, the literary, psychological, and epistemological influence of "Gerontius" on "Carrion Comfort," the paper will show how an apocalyptic angst/tone is expressed by the distressed characters, who "wish day not come, not wish to be." Whereas both characters are involved in an apocalyptic dream in the shift from death to possible rebirth, they never fully become installed into an apocalyptic condition with all of the rhetorical tropes, signpostings, and apocalyptic postures. They remain bound within their own personal condition, fearful of risking the self in cosmic recovery, and so never become envois of the apocalypse armed with either missiles or missives (Derrida). Wanting to preserve personal privilege, the integrity of the self, and Victorian manliness, made more anxious facing the threat of castration ("all that makes me man"; "these last strands of man"), the Newman and Hopkins characters resist self-organization and the chaos that fuels dissipative emergence, the "chance," as Hopkins himself puts it, that left to itself and time, "falls into an order as well as purpose." What results is a nightmarish dream without public vision.

Session V: Women's Dreams of Professionalism

Donna Parsons, "The Dream of Musical Opportunities: The New Woman and the Realities of Professional Musicianship"

...the audience had confirmed his own fear that only very slowly would the quality of the music be recognized by even the more cultivated public. It had invaded fresh territory ...added to the expression, and was meanwhile a new language to casual listeners. It was rebel music, offensive to the orthodox listeners.

In Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Hadria Fullerton's composition teacher, the concert pianist Jouffroy, tried programming one of her works in his concerts as a means to bolster her artistic career and financial situation. However, the audience did not react enthusiastically. Even though Hadria's compositions were new and innovative, no publisher would print them. All her submissions were returned to her because "publishers could not venture on anything of a character so unpopular. The music had merit, but it was eccentric." Without publication revenues, Hadria found it difficult to support herself.

Hadria's real-life counterparts were all too familiar with these circumstances. Indeed in an 1883 address to the Musical Association in London, Stephen Stratton, a male sympathetic to the cause of women musicians, asserted that

Great talent has been shown by women in various forms of art, perhaps more curious than beautiful. If in these arts woman has not attained the high position achieved in literature, it must be accounted for, not by her incapacity for art, but by what evolutionists call "arrested development." Social law and prejudice were against her. She had no freedom or opportunity for independent action.

As the twentieth century approached, women envisioned roles for themselves in music that took place outside of the domestic sphere. More and more, they began to look at music as a serious vocation. However, this movement from private, familial entertainment was heavily debated and contested by male authorities.

While it was true that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, women were able to enroll in leading universities and conservatories, and by the 1920s to obtain degrees, it was also true that these women faced a harsh reality once they left the relatively cozy confines of the academic community. Every avenue of musical employment was fraught with detours. Orchestra positions were not open to women. Conductors and concert promoters rarely dared to look at their scores, and university teaching positions were not available. They were left to their own devices to further their careers, which most often meant teaching rudimentary skills to beginners.

Novelists would utilize musical performances and musicality in their fiction to comment and react to these issues. Performing as a talented amateur in a controlled environment is quite different from performing as a professional. George Gissing's The Whirlpool (1897) examines the issues raised when Alma Frothingham decides she is destined to be a professional violinist. Moore's Evelyn Innes (1898) critiques the life of a professional singer, and in The Daughters of Danaus (1894) Caird shows that financial resources and a supportive family are needed to sustain a career as a composer. In this talk I will explore the difficulties the "new woman" faced in achieving her professional musical dreams, and I will highlight the ways in which these issues are mirrored in Gissing, Moore, and Caird's novels.

Jennifer Phegley, "Making the Dream a Reality: Victoria Magazine and the Creation of a Feminist Literary Criticism, 1863-67"

Edited, printed, and published by Emily Faithfull and the progressive group of working women at Langham Place, Victoria Magazine aimed to provide good literature alongside a moderate feminist social agenda that advocated women's education, employment, and rights. Although some critics contend that Victoria's chief value lies in its chronicling of the events in the woman's movement and in its "special purpose" of providing women with a successful public forum for two decades, Martha Westwater acknowledges that the magazine had "definite literary pretensions" and Alver Ellegard describes Victoria first as "a fiction magazine," adding that it also contained "some useful information on feminine subjects." I will focus on the ways in which Victoria's "literary pretensions" coincided with its "special purpose" by furthering women's professional positions as literary critics.

I argue that a vital part of Victoria's purpose was to transform the dream of establishing women in the profession of literary criticism into a reality, thereby allowing its founders to contribute to the production and definition as well as the consumption of literary culture. Victoria's book review section emerged as the crowning glory of the magazine that combined its woman's rights and literary agendas by mapping out a feminist conception of literary realism that promoted realistic examples of "good" literature based on their depiction of moral, intelligent, and independent female characters who could serve as role models for the "new woman." Through its reviews, Victoria worked to sustain a culture of women's intellectual activity and establish women as central-rather than peripheral-to the literary community. Therefore, Victoria Magazine was one fairly successful attempt to establish feminist criticism as a Victorian reality.

Session VI: Newman and Elgar and The Dream of Gerontius

Walter Arnstein, "Victorian Anti-Catholicism and the Case of Sir Edward Elgar"

In order to become the early twentieth-century national embodiment of English music, Sir Edward Elgar had to overcome two major handicaps: (1) his lowly provincial social origins; (2) his Roman Catholic birth and upbringing. The roots of anti-Catholicism in England may be traced to the Reformation. By the eighteenth century, English and (after 1707) British nationalism had come to be equated with Protestantism even as Catholicism continued to be identified with foreign powers such as France. Although the Penal Laws were largely abolished by the time of "Catholic Emancipation," (1829), during the early and mid-Victorian years, Protestant/ Catholic tensions persisted because of (1) the political activities of Protestant societies; (2) the implications of the evangelical revival; (3) the fears of large-scale conversion raised by the Oxford movement; (4) the strengthening of Roman Catholicism in England by large-scale immigration from Ireland; (5) the effects of "Papal Aggression," (1850) and the teachings of Pope Pius IX and Cardinal Manning. Elgar's rise to eminence was facilitated by the easing of religious tensions during the final decades of the century. In his later years, ironically, Elgar ceased to be a practicing Roman Catholic.

Charles McGuire, "A Victorian Tale: Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius"

David Goslee, "New-man as Old Man in 'The Dream of Gerontius'"

John Henry Newman's Apologia carries on multiple dialogues with multiple, often mutually incompatible, audiences. To English Protestants, he shows boundless respect for the characteristically English virtues of honesty, common sense and plain speaking. To the Roman hierarchy, he preaches his own sincere submission to Catholic doctrine and practice. To his friends and supporters, he sets himself up as living proof that in going this far into Catholicism, they need go no farther. Besides these audiences, there remained yet another one that saw Newman himself as carrying greater religious authority and credibility than any available creed or communion. Like the Apologia, his poem "Gerontius" should be read on various levels and as if written to various audiences. The poem's invocations of asceticism and spiritual election are authored by the visionary power and authorized by the self-imposed authority of Newman as Anglican seer. When we compare its portraits of angels and devils with his earlier ones, however, we see that they have been subsumed within Catholic orthodoxy and the more modest role there accorded to the individual believer. Finally, particularly in his portrayal of celestial landscapes, these apparently incompatible visions-and the mutually hostile audiences associated with them-are blended within the capaciousness of Newman's spiritual language and spiritual universe.

Session VII: Myth and Reality in the Victorian Press

David Kamper, "Popular Sunday Newspapers, Content Analysis, and the London Dock Strike of 1889: An Investigation of a Victorian Myth"

Modern scholarship has inherited the Victorian belief that popular Sunday newspapers, like Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper and Reynolds's News were little more than sensationalist scandal sheets designed to titillate their working-class readers. Virginia Berridge's examination of mid-Victorian Sunday newspapers (still the only monograph-length study of the Sunday newspaper genre) concluded that their supposed radicalism was merely "surface rhetoric" intended to promote sales. With this interpretation, Berridge echoes the thoughts of Victorian political, social, and cultural critics, who were unable to conceal their contempt for the supposedly puerile and sensational working-class Sunday newspapers.

This study will challenge this Victorian and modern myth of the content-empty popular Sunday newspaper. In doing so, it seeks to problematize existing ideas about the relationship between popular culture and popular politics. By employing new techniques of discourse analysis to complement traditional statistical methods, it will examine how Sunday newspapers, far from being a Victorian equivalent of 'infotainment,' allowed for the articulation and reinforcement of important political and cultural identities. By an examination of newspaper coverage of the London Dock Strike of 1889, this paper will demonstrate that popular Sunday newspapers, as a genre, had the potential to serve as sources of working-class identity, and were capable of both educating and politicizing their readers. Sunday newspapers presented the Dock Strike in conceptual terms far removed from their middle-class daily counterparts. They were clearly written for a working-class reader, who would have identified with the discourses they employed, and would have found in Sunday papers a source of otherwise unavailable news and information. However much Victorian critics imagined Sunday newspapers to be mindless diversions, the reality is that Lloyd's, Reynolds's, and other Sunday papers were serious, informative, and extremely important sources of news and ideas for the Victorian working classes.

James M. Cornelius, "Who owned the Globe, Who Read It, and Why? The Great Shift in Victorian Politics, 1865-1878"

Neither Steven Koss nor Alan J. Lee, leading scholars of the Victorian press, give the Globe much space in their work, and the reasons are easy to surmise. Long affiliated with Lord Palmerston, the Globe was a staunch Whig daily that sold a few thousand copies to well-off Londoners and gradually lost influence as the Times muscled on to the scene. After Palmerston died in 1865, Whigs became an endangered species, and so too the Globe. A syndicate of Conservatives, however, snapped it up off the market, lowered the price, changed its color, and pitched it to a middle-class and upper-working-class readership -- exactly the people who would soon dominate the electorate, they thought. Circulation rose slightly.

Had the newly Conservative, common-man Globe failed to predict a political shift in Victorian Britain? No. Rather, this paper will suggest, the daily contributed to the revival of Conservative-party fortunes by helping to lay the ground for electoral victories in the metropolis and the kingdom overall in the next several years. By employing marketing strategies more commonly associated with the Harmsworth era decades later, and by adding feature pieces of 'fine writing,' the Globe appealed to the better educated but still money-conscious middling sorts. Moreover, it did not lose political influence, but rather broadened it: the Conservative Morning Standard, generally thought to be the voice of the Tory elite, had about the same circulation as the Globe, which broke two major foreign-affairs stories in the period under examination here thanks to its top-level political contacts. One story, about the Abyssinian campaign of 1868, ran in a special Sunday edition, also signaling that the days of Sabbatarian dominance in the Conservative party were ending. Later, one of the few military men to wield pen as editor of a daily helped shape the new tone of British imperialism.

And the readership? Why were the Queen and several Conservative Cabinet members regularly reading a paper supposedly meant for the New Suburban Man? This analysis will propose that 'One Nation' Toryism found expression in this relaunched daily and eventually made both a commercial success of it and a more literarily and politically important contribution than modern scholarship has found. one more thing: why was its ownership such a secret?

Some final words from the editor: As President Kris Garrigan has written, this past year has been another good year for MVSA. Besides the good news about the conference, the growth of the Arnstein Fund, and the institution of the new Burgan Prize, we happily saw some significant growth in our membership rolls in 1999-2000. We gained 36 new members, more than half of these being graduate students who have taken advantage of our policy which grants three years of dues-free membership to new student members. We now number well over 200 Victorianists from about 130 colleges and universities, with a good number of independent scholars among our ranks as well.

In the coming year each member could serve MVSA well by inviting friends/associates/students to join us. We would especially welcome new members in some of the disciplines which seem to be under-represented in the association these days-history, art history, music, religion. Let's all encourage Victorianists whom we know to submit paper proposals, and to attend MVSA 2001 in Chicago. Remember to refer anyone who is interested in finding out more about MVSA to our website at www2.ic.edu/MVSA.

Don't forget to renew/update your own membership sometime in the coming months. Indeed, as you finish reading the Bulletin, this might be a good time to renew. Use the form provided on the website to submit current information for the directory along with your dues check. And why not include a contribution to the Arnstein Fund as well?