The preface considers why historical context is such a rich and complicated lens through which to approach Michael Field and their work, given the complexity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lives and collaborative identity as Michael Field, and the startling range of past historical periods with which their work engaged, including Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Renaissance Italy, among other periods. The Preface approaches Michael Field as firmly situated within the cultures of the fin de siècle or 1890s, and discusses how their work develops in the twentieth century or modernist era. Finally, the Preface approaches the more difficult aspects of Michael Field’s identity, addressing issues of gender, sexuality, and the incestual dimension of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s position as ‘Victorian decadents’ in the early twentieth century. It outlines Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s ambivalent response to fin-de-siècle decadence, as seen in their reactions to the likes of Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book. The chapter then proposes that Michael Field actually became more attached to decadence as the ‘yellow nineties’ waned, focusing on how Bradley and Cooper’s dedication to decadence is expressed most clearly in poems about Whym Chow, their beloved dog whose death in 1906 catalysed their conversion to Catholicism. The chapter finally discusses the decadent tropes found in Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914) and Michael Field’s Catholic poems.

Though Michael Field most readily identified with the poetry of their male contemporaries, including Swinburne, reading their poetry volumes of 1889, 1893, 1908, 1912, and 1913 against the backdrop of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women poets reveals multiple affinities in form, genre, theme, and symbolism. Beginning with Sappho and ending with Alice Meynell, with whom Michael Field corresponded after 1906, this chapter notes the connections of Michael Field’s poetry with Romantic poets Mary Robinson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Felicia Hemans; with Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Augusta Webster, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Katharine Tynan, and Mathilde Blind; and with modernist poets H.D. and Amy Lowell. Reading Michael Field ‘among’ women poets reveals another layer of complexity in their poetic career, redresses a less-studied aspect of their work, and extends their central role in studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary history and poetics.

This chapter examines Michael Field’s queer aestheticism by focusing on their complicated relationship to Walter Pater. It explores how Bradley and Cooper, as women writers and same-sex lovers, adapted Pater’s notably queer aesthetic philosophy to craft their own distinctively modern poetics. They shared Pater’s vision of aesthetic modernity, characterised by an emphasis on personal sensation, sexual dissidence, and intellectual rebellion. However, they also critiqued his masculinist biases and his shift towards respectability later in life. Through their poetic works, diary, and intimate correspondence, they creatively revised Pater’s ideas, positioning themselves as both heirs and innovators within the queer aesthetic tradition and building upon his insights to realise a broader and more inclusive artistic legacy.

This section sets out the key aims, argument, and methodology of the book, concluding with a comprehensive chapter summary.

How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.

The conclusion, Victorian Ignorance, places the history that Selling Sexual Knowledge has traced into conversation with the emergence of a new history of sexual knowledge at the dawn of the twentieth century. While considering how well publishing activities that the book explores would have served Victorian readers, it argues that the ways Victorians discussed their reading experiences evince what the historian Kate Fisher has called an “epistemology of sexual ignorance,” in which sexual knowledge is thought of as a set of facts that must be learned through interaction with an expert. It further argues that commercial and rhetorical practices explored in the book not only encouraged this way of conceptualizing sexual knowledge, but helped foster the emergence of a historical narrative about Victorian censorship that would serve as a powerful justification for sexual-scientific research and sex reform movements in the twentieth century. At the same time, this narrative would obfuscate the extent to which Victorians enjoyed access to sexual information in the new age of mass print.

This introduction outlines how studying the book trade can help us better understand the circulation of medical knowledge about sex and reproduction during the Victorian period, and the development of busineses, institutions, and narratives that claimed authority over it. Weaving a historiographic overview with an overview of the book’s approach and argument, it turns readers’ attention to medical works’ status as more than texts, highlighting the fact that they are material objects that must be made, promoted, and distributed, and that these actions accrue meanings of their own. It then articulates the book’s focus on the activities of four differently identified groups of players – pornographers, radicals, regular practitioners, and irregular practitioners – who brought sexual knowledge into non-expert readers’ hands and, in various ways, became embroiled in debates about medical obscenity. The introduction then outlines how the book tracks these agents’ intersecting activities to open up an argument about how and why allegations of obscenity became a means of selling books, contesting authority, and consolidating emergent collective identities.

Samuel Butler sharply divides critics, some seeing him as a relativist and thus a precursor of modernism, others as a purveyor of outdated scientific and philosophical dogma. This essay situates him as a transitional figure, straddling modern and Victorian paradigms in the tradition of the novel of ideas. Butler’s relativistic tendencies emerge through distinctive formal techniques, his chief influence on the modern novel: enigmatic use of satire; rapid, dissonant tonal shifts; defamiliarization of commonplace ideas; and fierce iconoclasm – techniques that fuel his radical questioning both of rationality and of ideas themselves. But Butler also affirmed common sense, instinct, and faith – in opposition to rationality – by conceiving them in Lamarckian evolutionary terms: that is, as repositories of intellectual choices made over the course of millennia and preserved in collective unconscious memory. Butler thus believed that ideas always fall short of truth, even as they facilitate an open-ended, interminable progress toward it.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (Observations of Hutom the Owl[GK14]; 1862) provides a bird’s eye view, so to speak, of nineteenth-century Calcutta, the bustling metropolis that also served as the seat of the British government in India. In reading the vignettes of urban life that the text proffers, this essay makes note of Sinha’s even-handed satire of the foibles of natives and the British alike. But given that it is the nouveau riche Bengali gentry that becomes the target for Sinha’s most trenchant critique, the essay considers how Hutom[GK15], written in the aftermath of 1857, an event that Sinha often refers to, presents, nonetheless, a more lateral view that redirects, if not displaces, received notions of colonial resistance. Hutom [GK16]affects, instead, a charged insouciance that revels in its immediate socius that it also critique. It does so, though, by deploying the form of the literary sketch and a narrative mode that is antinarrative or, more specifically – nonevental – in ways that are transimperially imbricated with nineteenth-century literary history, English as well as Bengali.