This article provides a critical comparison between Cory Doctorow’s adapted short story “Clockwork Fagin” and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. It focuses particularly on Doctorow’s use of the posthuman “modded” child in order to question firstly whether the text performs a…

For the last several decades, there has been a pronounced influence of “retro” fashion and style on various youth subcultures. This occurrence has been in the form of larger, cultural trends in both the underground and mainstream, such as the…

A popular critical debate in recent years has concerned the significance of spectrality in neo-Victorian fiction. With reference to Freud, Derrida, and a range of neo-Victorian authors, this essay argues that the emphasis on the ways in which the past…

Since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic, several Hopkins critics have speculated that the poet’s wish for ‘masterly execution’ appears to betray his own fear of becoming unmanly or effeminate in his art and life. My intention is…

Nineteenth-century girlhood was imagined as a decisive period of liminality: distinct from both childhood and adulthood, it shaped the womanhood that followed it. Shipboard diaries written by emigrants engage with a similar period of transformation. Discussing three diaries written by…

This article considers the rise and fall of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s antipodean fairyland, her pictorial alternative to the masculinist vision of Australia at the nominal end of its colonial thraldom to Britain. Unlike their mischievous and anachronistic antecedents from Victorian…

This essay reads Tom Phillips’s stunning and still in-process artist’s book A Humument (1966-) as exemplar of a non-hermeneutic vein of neo-Victorian textual production that stands as playful foil to the more familiar, suspicion-inflected appropriations of the nineteenth century that…

This article considers the history of the dramatic monologue with a focus on the neo-Victorian poetry of Mick Imlah (1958-2009). Beginning by identifying the inherent strangeness of the monologue form by looking at the ongoing debates on the relationship between…

A Tale of Two Cities is saturated with violence: execution, mutilation, rape, and mass slaughter abound; broken, discarded, forgotten, nameless bodies are everywhere. Dickens’s narrator, as the title teaches us, recounts one tale about two cities; as the novel progresses,…

Near the start of Charles Dickens’s 1838 novel Nicholas Nickleby, the cruel and conniving Ralph Nickleby speculates on a new monopoly, the “United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.” The actual motivation for the company…