Clayton Carlyle Tarr, “Stillborn Plots: Revolution, Imagination, and the Failure of Romanticism” (pp. 415–447) The metaphor “fell stillborn from the press” was used frequently by Romantic-era critics to disparage unsuccessful literary productions. Stillbirth statistics began to be collected in earnest in the late eighteenth century alongside an explosion of midwifery texts and obstetric advances. Since Romantic authors often referred to their texts as offspring, it is useful to understand stillbirth plots in these texts as evidence of the authors’ anxiety over imaginative or revolutionary failure. Stillbirth plots are a recurrent theme in Romantic literature, appearing in both novels and poetry, and they are tied together by the mental struggle of the creator, either female or male. In Romantic novels, stillbirth plots signal the defeat of radical theories, whereas in poetry they express the failure of the imagination. Ultimately, these metaphors of failed parturition demonstrate Romantic writers’ fascination with contemporary obstetrics, which made extraordinary advances in the late eighteenth century only to remain static throughout the nineteenth century.

Alexandra Urakova,“‘ I do not want her, I am sure’: Commodities, Gifts, and Poisonous Gifts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin ” (pp. 448–472) This essay focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in discussing the interrelation of sentimentality, slavery, and race. It asks what happens when a slave himself or herself becomes a gift in the way that Mr. Shelby buys Eliza as a present for his wife, and St. Claire seems to bestow Uncle Tom upon Eva and ultimately gives Topsy to his cousin Ophelia. Although much has been said about “sentimental property” or “sympathetic ownership” in Stowe, the instances of exchanging slaves as gifts in the novel have been surprisingly overlooked. Touching upon one of the novel’s important and precarious themes—the distinction between people and things—the aforementioned episodes not only contribute to our understanding of the novel’s gift economy but also invite us to revise the complex attitude to racial otherness in Uncle Tom’s Cabin . I claim that while pursuing a sentimental ideology of the gift that comes to support racialist implications of its abolitionist rhetoric, Stowe’s novel also contains a radical potential of its critique embodied in the image of the poisonous gift of a slave child, Topsy, who figures as an unwelcome, wasteful, and repellent present. Concurring with critical opinion that Stowe’s racism is in the sentiment, this essay suggests that the novel’s unsentimental, explicitly racist metaphors paradoxically inform one of Stowe’s strongest antislavery arguments.

Pascale M. Manning, “‘There is nothing human in nature’: Denying the Anthropocene in Richard Jefferies” (pp. 473–501) This essay contends that the work of the nineteenth-century British writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies embodies both a recognition and a radical denial of the Anthropocene, expressing a nascent form of the ambivalence that stalks our contemporary recognitions and misrecognitions of the human in/and nature. Drawing upon a range of Jefferies’s writings—both his essays and his autobiography in addition to his fiction—it argues that there exists in Jefferies’s work a recurring vein of anti-ecological thought, particularly evidenced in the way it frequently depicts strict boundary lines, whether between agricultural and urban spaces, between civilization and wild nature, or between the human and the natural world. Taking issue with recent ecocritical accounts of Jefferies’s post-apocalyptic novel After London (1885), this essay rereads Jefferies’s novel in light of the wider range of his writings to argue that it is most usefully read not as a proto-ecological rebuke to the unsustainability of human agro-industrial practices, nor as a prophetic evocation of a world re-greened by the collapse of those practices, but rather as the irresolute culmination of a career spent both testifying to the essential inviolability of nature and bearing witness to the mounting evidence of anthropogenic rupture.

Pablo A. Ramirez, “The Woman of Tomorrow: Gertrude Atherton and the Latina Foremother of the Californian New Woman” (pp. 502–534) Throughout the 1890s, Gertrude Atherton employs the figure of the aristocratic Californiana (Mexican Californian woman) to extend classical liberalism’s economic model of individualism to include women. By joining the aristocratic Californiana with American liberalism, Atherton transforms California’s history of capitalist development into a romance in which the creation of new markets generates not only profits, but the New Woman as well. In Atherton’s stories of Alta California, which I call “tales of romantic liberalism,” the history and evolution of California and the New Woman is narrated through the promises (or contracts) that a Californiana character makes and the obligations she accepts or rejects. The Californiana in The Doomswoman (1893) and Before the Gringo Came (1894) becomes the foundation for the New Woman, whose personal development and advancement promises to perfect liberal capitalism through her consensual romantic unions. As the decade drew to a close and the war with Spain became imminent, however, one can see in Atherton’s The Californians (1898) her growing fear that the massification of politics and culture imperiled not only liberal capitalism and democracy, but the evolution of women’s individuality as well. As a result, the evolution of the Californiana character is no longer reliant on a union with a capitalist contractarian partner but on the reaffirmation of her aristocratic individualism. Through her Californiana heroines, Atherton engages the Californio past in order to imagine the evolution of women’s individuality as the United States undergoes a shift from classical liberalism to modern liberalism and from republic to overseas empire.

Katherine E. Blake “Urban Burial Reform in William Wordsworth’s ‘Village Churchyard’” (pp. 279–304) This essay looks at the relationship between space and class in nineteenth-century English burials in order to shed new light on William Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs (1810, 1876) and “The Brothers” (1800). While Wordsworth’s work dwells on pastoral images of burial, I argue that his representations in fact align more closely with the cultural practices and values underpinning urban burial conventions. Through his representation of burial space, Wordsworth’s work plays out urban concerns about burial in the countryside. Ultimately, this essay argues that the exportation of urban concerns to imaginary rural sites accounts for the utility of Wordsworth’s work to mid-nineteenth-century burial reformers, and particularly to Edwin Chadwick, a utilitarian known for his work on the 1832 Poor Law and sanitary guidelines for burial. By reevaluating what prior studies have said about Chadwick’s reforms in light of recent work on his economic theories, I argue that Chadwick’s citation of Wordsworth’s first “Essay upon Epitaphs” transforms the latter’s pastoral vision into an endorsement of a national cemetery. I explore the extent to which Wordsworth’s early-nineteenth-century ideas are and are not compatible with Chadwick’s mid-century reforms.

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein , Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein : the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein , in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Clark Davis, “Very, Garrison, Thoreau: Variations on the Antebellum Passive” (pp. 332–359) This essay contends that the poetry of Jones Very, often considered predominately “mystical,” was deeply engaged in political debates of the era. Not only did Very often write poems with an avowedly public purpose, but his seemingly otherworldly, spiritual sonnets sometimes participated in antebellum political debates. The sonnet “The Hand and Foot” (1839), for instance, describes a mode of Christian passivity and quietism that echoes the contemporaneous call for passive “non-resistance” to slavery found in William Lloyd Garrison’s 1838 “Declaration of Sentiments,” the foundational statement of the New England Non-Resistance Society. Very’s poem also describes a mode of Christian behavior that is radically disruptive of social conformity, a kind of embodied “prayer” that may have influenced Henry David Thoreau’s more famous manifesto of passive resistance, “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). Thoreau witnessed Very’s passive but disruptive behavior on more than one occasion in Concord, Massachusetts, well before his own unique dramatization of nonconformity in the mid 1840s. Comparing Very’s erasure of individual will to Thoreau’s more canny deployment of passivity can help us clarify antebellum modes of passive engagement as they evolved toward the eventual violence of John Brown’s raid and the American Civil War.

Ilana M. Blumberg, “Sympathy or Religion? George Eliot and Christian Conversion” (pp. 360–387) This essay argues that a postsecular moment requires our return to George Eliot to consider anew the relations between religion and secularity. Looking at her early works, in particular “Janet’s Repentance” (1857) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), I suggest that Eliot offers us a counterintuitive narrative in which her heroines’ ethical transformation coincides with a conversion to Christianity rather than a move away from it. Rather than imagining a thoroughly Christian England revitalized by its turn to humanist religion, Eliot depicts a nominally Christian England, attached to hollow forms and mere custom, in need of conversion to an ardent faith. In these novels, evangelicalism, for all its flaws, functions as the vessel for such conversion when human beings’ own agency fails. I suggest here that what we have construed as sympathy over recent decades of critical reading may be more intelligible if we read it as grace, thus leaving us to reassess the extent to which major mid-Victorian intellectuals sought to conceive a post-Christian ethics.