“Everybody’ private carriage.” Omnibus Travel in Victorian Literature

Introduced into the streets of first Paris and then London in the late 1820s, the omnibus quickly became a popular and convenient means of urban transport. But as many historians of culture note, the omnibus connecting different points in the metropolitan space, was a space in its own right, with a range of complications and complexities. Its interior constituted a peculiar enclave within a larger communal space and thus made its passengers experience - and negotiate between - freedom and constraint, convenience and discomfort as well as anonymity and intimacy. Using omnibus scenes in the works of such writers as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Augustus Sala, or Amy Levy, I shall examine some of the above-mentioned aspects of the conveyance. Most specifically, I shall look into the complexities of the visual interactions between the omnibus passengers as well as those between the passengers and the urban environment outside the vehicle.

‘The Consenting Silence’: Chaperoning the Orphan Sisterhood of Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop

The parentless child of nineteenth-century literature was designed to elicit an inherent sense of social responsibility in Victorian readers. The orphan inadvertently rejects the cultural ideology of the ideal home and therefore embodies society's worst fear. No longer belonging to a family unit, the child is left with an incomplete moral education. Chaperones and guardians are required to “rescue” the orphan from ignorance, and society from their disquieting presence. Amy Levy empathised with the orphan model due to her own sense of otherness, as a result of her race, religion, sexuality, and New Woman ideologies. Levy observed parallels between societal fear of the orphan and that of female agency. Subsequently, the recently orphaned Lorimer sisters of Levy's Romance of a Shop are of marriageable age, yet emancipate themselves from their matchmaking families, becoming each other's chaperones as they open a photography studio. Thus begins a narrative which attempts to reconcile the sisters' wish to quietly persevere in their vocation and voice their innate feminism. This article will explore how speech and silence are used to embody these sisters' torn loyalties to their gender and each other, examining how their shift in social status alters their dialogue and where their silence speaks volumes.

The Response of the Late Victorian Feminist Press to Same-Sex Desire Controversies

Molly Youngkin’s essay investigates the heterosexism of a fin de siècle feminist newspaper, the Women’s Penny Paper (1894–99, later retitled the Women’s Herald and the Woman’s Signal), highlighting its treatment of three controversies: the Oscar Wilde trials, the death of poet Amy Levy, and the emergence of Sappho as a model of lesbian new womanhood. When the paper did address these controversies it ‘reshaped narratives about this [same-sex] desire to fit its own heterosexist agenda,’ responded in a disapproving way, or avoided a discussion of sexuality entirely (p. 543). The overall effect of this editorial bias was to pursue an ‘overarching agenda of advocating for heterosexual women’ and to reinforce social purity debates about ‘the effects of men’s sexual practices on heterosexual women and their families’ (p. 544). These feminist papers thus constructed the ‘other’ in ways that upheld restrictive conventions of race and sexuality while claiming to be vehicles of progressive thought.

Reading Poet Amy Levy through Victorian Newspapers

In this essay, Linda K. Hughes casts light on Amy Levy’s (1861–89) dexterous placement of her poetry in carefully selected newspapers throughout the 1880s. Levy is perhaps best known for her novels and three published volumes of poetry, as well as for her associations with various intellectual and political coteries in fin de siècle London; however, she was, in fact, ‘entrepreneurial’ in her dealings with the daily and weekly newspapers she published in throughout the 1880s, often ‘submitting in a verse medium that had already found favor with the editors’ (p. 459). The significance of media publishing contexts for Levy’s career has been underplayed in scholarship of the author, yet, as Hughes cautions, to obscure this dimension of her authorship is ‘to miss a crucial dimension of her work, even to distort her achievement and her engagement with the publishing world’ (p. 456). What emerges from this account is an entirely new perspective on Levy as a savvy and strategic newspaper poet, with a perspicacious understanding of poetry’s relationship with ‘audience, placement, and opportunity in the Victorian press’ (p.457).

Retrieving Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets: The Transformative Myths, Fragments and Voices of Webster, Blind and Levy

The critical recuperation of late nineteenth-century women poets is due significantly to the renewed interest in and study of the poetical works of Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind and Amy Levy (1860-90) by postmodern readers. A major reason for this ‘salvage’ may be that they represent and embody the profound and extraordinary changes that characterize the British Fin de Siècle, in which the transition from the Victorians to the Moderns implied the transformation or reconfiguration of certain myths or (hi)stories and the critical re-use or ‘recycling’ of major literary forms. This essay seeks to demonstrate that while Webster's poetry is firmly grounded in social activism and the exploration and dramatization of the nature of female experience, Blind's epic and dramatic verse creates new myths of human destiny, reclaiming the Poet's role as the singer of the age's scientific deeds, while Levy's lyrics signal the New Woman poet's role as victim of the pressures of emancipation. Through these hybrid and fragmentary forms, Webster, Blind and Levy literally give voice to unspeakable feelings and situations, in which the anomalous and the marginal are made central.