Trust your senses? An Introduction to the Victorian Sensorium

“Trust your senses not your neighbours.” – London Transport security notice. In the wake of 9/11 and the London bombings of 2005, public safety campaigns in London featured signs with the above warning on the underground and at bus stops. The postmodern sensorium is now regarded as a trustworthy source of information as citizens are hailed to pay attention to their senses in order to protect their community. In the twenty-first century, it seems that sensory experience has become a valued resource in the fight against terrorism. What we may know of our neighbours through the more public proximities of urban everyday life is pitted against the private, interior knowledge provided by our senses: the look that seems hostile, or the infringement of personal space that causes our heart rate to accelerate with anxiety, apparently warrants reporting to the authorities rather than being dismissed as just another uneasy sensory impression that is part of the fabric of urban experience. Within the binary logic of this security campaign, your senses are reliable, your neighbours are not. What would the Victorians have made of this? Did they trust their senses? Did they believe the private knowledge gained from individual sensory experience to be more reliable than publicly-validated forms of knowledge? How typical, for instance, was John Ruskin’s assertion in Modern Painters that an error – of judgement, of perception – was “caused by an excited state of the feelings”? The unreliability of sensory perception was further emphasized by the troubling link between the sensory and the sensual, a recurring concern for some Victorian commentators, as the “Fleshly School of Poetry” controversy exemplified. In his review of Rossetti’s poetry, it will be remembered, Robert Buchanan described “Nuptial Sleep” as registering “merely animal sensations,” and condemned Rossetti’s work as a sign of the pernicious spread of sensuality throughout Victorian culture. For other Victorians, however, the senses could offer a valuable and different mode of knowledge not accessible through more rational means, such as a unique mode of sympathetic connection with the wider world, as William Cohen has compellingly described in his recent exploration of Victorian literature and the senses

Introduction: Victorian Ecology and the Anthropocene

Ernst Haeckel’s formulation of the term ‘ecology’ occurred at a time when the ecology of the British environment — the material and social relations between humans, other organisms, and the wider natural world — was being transformed by the impact of industrial capitalism and imperialism. The introduction to this issue of 19 sketches out how the Victorian imagination responded to changing ideas about the relationship between the human and non-human worlds in the long nineteenth century. In doing so, it builds upon the recent turn to ecocritical approaches within Victorian studies, and the emergence of Anthropocene studies, an interdisciplinary field that seeks to theorize and historicize the ways that humans have influenced the geology and biology of the planet. The aim is to underline the relevance of the Victorian context to present-day concerns around anthropogenic pollution, fossil fuel reliance, and even climate change

Victorian Studies in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Claire Colebrook

In this interview, Claire Colebrook discusses the implications of the Anthropocene for Victorian literature — and, by extension, for the field of Victorian studies — as well as literary history and critical theory more broadly. A literary scholar by training, with a focus on Romanticism, Colebrook is now a leading figure in Anthropocene studies, and her work in this field examines how climate change forces us to reassess the modes of thinking upon which we have come to rely in the humanities. In this provocative discussion, Colebrook addresses the ways in which the Anthropocene might be traced back through Romantic and Victorian poetry, the emergence of post-apocalyptic narratives in the nineteenth century, the challenges posed to feminism by planetary destruction, and the humanities’ complicity with ecological degradation

Silkworms and Shipwrecks: Sustainability in Dombey and Son

Seeking to prepare her friend Lucretia Tox for the revelation of Mr Dombey's engagement, Louisa Chick, Dombey's sister, turns to the natural world to illustrate the inevitability of change: It's a world of change. . . .Why, my gracious me, what is there that does not change! Even the silkworm, who I am sure might be supposed not to trouble itself about such subjects, changes into all sorts of unexpected things continually. (434; ch. 29) For Mrs Chick, the silkworm seems to exemplify the truism that change is a natural and inevitable part of life but, in the context of global sericulture, her example is perhaps more apposite than she realizes. Silk production not only radically terminates the natural metamorphosis from caterpillar to moth, it also constitutes an industry subject to the volatilities of global trade and regulation, the cycles of fashion, the impact of new technologies, not to mention the vagaries of disease, climate and habitat. While Britain had been importing raw silk from China in limited supplies from the eighteenth century onwards, by the time Dombey and Son was written, the devastation of sericultural crops in France and Italy by a disease which had been spreading since the 1820s allowed Britain to benefit from the treaty port system (established as a result of the Opium Wars) and re-export raw silk to the Continent (Ma 332–3). Thus, silk – circulating around the world, and linking producers of the raw material in India, China, or Japan with child labourers in Macclesfield, handloom weavers in Spitalfields, textile designers in France, and wealthy consumers in London – positions the humble silkworm within complex and dynamic networks of uncertain sustainability

“Feeling for Beauty”

May Morris (1862–1938), renowned craftswoman and daughter of William Morris, had an unconventional Victorian childhood in a home where all the members of the family were engaged in various forms of aesthetic labor, either as amateurs or professionals, and shared an aesthetic philosophy that blended the artisanal and the experimental from which would develop the Arts and Crafts movement. This article will examine the fragmentary recollections of her childhood recorded by May Morris in the introductions she wrote for the twenty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of William Morris as a rich resource for Victorian sensory history because of the emphasis she places on the development of the child's sensorium, especially in relation to touch as the vital sense that linked family intimacy with creative activity. Employing the term “tactile aesthetics,” I show how, in the Morris household, the pleasurable sensual apprehension of the objects or materials worked by the hands of the craftsperson was inseparable from the complex feelings of connection with others. In such an environment, a feeling for beauty comprised a vital component of habitus, the embodied knowledges and aptitudes that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, are acquired from earliest childhood through the practices of everyday life within a specific social setting

“Feeling for Beauty”

May Morris (1862–1938), renowned craftswoman and daughter of William Morris, had an unconventional Victorian childhood in a home where all the members of the family were engaged in various forms of aesthetic labor, either as amateurs or professionals, and shared an aesthetic philosophy that blended the artisanal and the experimental from which would develop the Arts and Crafts movement. This article will examine the fragmentary recollections of her childhood recorded by May Morris in the introductions she wrote for the twenty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of William Morris as a rich resource for Victorian sensory history because of the emphasis she places on the development of the child's sensorium, especially in relation to touch as the vital sense that linked family intimacy with creative activity. Employing the term “tactile aesthetics,” I show how, in the Morris household, the pleasurable sensual apprehension of the objects or materials worked by the hands of the craftsperson was inseparable from the complex feelings of connection with others. In such an environment, a feeling for beauty comprised a vital component of habitus, the embodied knowledges and aptitudes that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, are acquired from earliest childhood through the practices of everyday life within a specific social setting

Edward Carpenter’s Queer Ecology of the Everyday

This article considers the place of the everyday in Edward Carpenter’s life and writings through the concept of queer ecology, which draws on queer theory to challenge and expand the possibilities for pleasure, experience, and relationships that occur in the interactions between human and non-human agents. The simple mode of everyday life based on a more direct relationship with the natural world, as described and advocated by Carpenter, was one that foregrounded desire and other intensities of experience, and had the capacity to transform the everyday