Sukanya Banerjee, “Writing Bureaucracy, Bureaucratic Writing: Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit , and Mid-Victorian Liberalism” (pp. 133–158) In its famed representation of the Circumlocution Office, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) is widely recognized as satirizing bureaucracy. Arguing instead that the novel proffers a more nuanced perspective on bureaucracy, this essay situates Dickens’s depiction of the Circumlocution Office amid mid-Victorian debates on liberalism. More specifically, the essay makes note of the tension between ascendant ideals of representative government and the acknowledged importance of a nonelected but competent bureaucracy. Dickens’s mediation of this tension, the essay argues, not only informs his representation of the Circumlocution Office but also accounts for the novel’s subdued tone and characterization, which the essay reads as ambivalence. But in reading the novel’s depiction of bureaucracy through the lens of ambivalence, the essay is also alert to Dickens’s bureaucratic method of writing Little Dorrit itself. The bureaucratic writing of the novel, the essay suggests, opens up the possibility not only of rethinking the role and place of bureaucracy but also of the boundaries between bureaucratic and literary sensibilities as well.

Kathleen Frederickson “Getting the Goods in Little Dorrit : Quarantine’s Queer Logistics” (pp. 159–183) Most queer readings of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) have focused on Miss Wade as a figure of proto-sexological pathology. Flipping critical attention to Tattycoram instead allows us to reexamine sexuality and quarantine in economic terms. Dickens chooses quarantine over other possible spaces of touch and confinement because it flags Tattycoram’s entry into the plot around these economics of circulation—the ability to profit from the movement rather than the production of commodities. In the 1820s, when Little Dorrit is set, a vocal anti-quarantine lobby was stridently lamenting the financial losses occasioned by holding goods in quarantine as they came into Europe from the Levant—a lament that was especially loud when it came to the costs incurred by northern mill owners who were importing increasingly large quantities of cotton from plague-prone Egypt. Dickens invokes the quarantine as the origin point of the connection between Tattycoram and Miss Wade to route a set of Gothic thematics through a scanty but significant plot structure that relies on what I call “logistical aesthetics,” by which I mean logistics rendered as form and tone, even when emptied of substantial parts of its diegetic function. Little Dorrit mixes its interest in the circulation of capital with the economics of inheritance, figured most prominently in the movement of the iron box containing the details of Arthur Clennam’s parentage. Tattycoram’s couriering of this box borrows the logistical urgency of anti-quarantine critique seemingly in the service of narrative resolution, drawing on logistics as a formal resource that substitutes narrative value for an absented economic value that, the novel suggests, occupies the place of her queerness. This joint focus on delivery and inheritance, moreover, strongly shapes the politics of kinship, intimacy, and desire for Tattycoram and Miss Wade.

Jason R. Rudy, “Settled: Dorrit Down Under” (pp. 184–206) Although the conclusion to Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) finds the protagonists Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit comfortably situated in London, the novel’s long and meandering narrative entertains alternate possibilities. This essay considers the relation of emigration to British middle-class identity, both in the historical context of the 1850s and in the fictional world of Dickens’s novel. Australian free emigration, which saw a significant rise in the 1850s, serves as a limit case against which to test the significance of remaining at home in England. Little Dorrit is a novel that “settles” on a domestic life of bourgeois stability, but it arrives at this conclusion only after contemplating less-predictable futures abroad. Dickens himself considered emigrating to Australia while writing Little Dorrit , and the novel’s quiet conclusion reflects the author’s own conflicted resolution to forego life beyond British shores. Dickens’s novel ultimately suggests that Victorian middle-class stability depended at least in part on the rejection of economic possibilities abroad.

Daniel M. Stout, “ Little , Maybe Less: Little Dorrit ’s Minimal Moralia” (pp. 207–238) Against our ordinary ways of reading the novel, this essay argues that Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) represents a stark refusal of the logics of accountability that necessarily underwrite any program of social reform. In pairing its critique of Circumlocution (which programmatically undervalues desert) with its critique of the Marshalsea (which programmatically overstates debt), the novel points not toward a future of happy proportionality—in which innovation might be meaningfully recognized and infractions responded to humanely—but toward a way of thinking that stands outside the liberal logics of exchange (of action and consequence, of sin and redemption, of debt and repayment) that animate both social critique and social reform. Rather than a reformist text, Little Dorrit ’s horizon is a world beyond good and evil—or, as we might also call it, after liberalism.

Joseph Phelan, “‘Bloomluxuriance’: Compound Words in the Poetry of the 1830s and 1840s” (pp. 1–23) The brief interregnum between Romanticism and Victorianism saw the emergence of and retreat from a number of formal and linguistic experiments in poetry. One of the most striking of these is the ostentatious employment of compound words; the early verse of Alfred Tennyson and some of his less-illustrious contemporaries is littered with coinages such as “tendriltwine,” “mellowmature,” and “bloomluxuriance.” The impetus behind this phenomenon came from developments in philology that emphasized the affinities between English and German and from the attempt to broaden the range of English verse by naturalizing metrical forms such as the hexameter, and was often associated with an impassioned if politically unfocused radicalism. In revising “Œnone” for republication in his 1842 Poems , Tennyson excised almost all of these compound words, a gesture of linguistic conformity that is the stylistic counterpart to what Isobel Armstrong calls the “loss of nerve” apparent in his work during this decade, and one that is paralleled in the work of some of his contemporaries. This experimental impulse did not disappear from Victorian poetry completely, however, and its survival helps to explain some of the quainter and more ungainly phenomena of later nineteenth-century verse.

Brianna Beehler, “The Doll’s Gift: Ventriloquizing Bleak House ” (pp. 24–49) This essay offers a new reading of the split narrative in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). Previous critics of the novel’s split narrative have primarily focused on the unequal knowledge and authority positions of the all-knowing third-person narrator and the unknowing first-person narrator, Esther Summerson. This division, however, does not fully account for the apparent slips and narrative exchanges between the two narrators, in which one narrator takes on the voice or knowledge position of the other. This essay takes up Robert Newsom’s suggestion that the only way to explain these “slips” is to conclude that Esther Summerson writes not only her own narration, but also that of the third-person narrator. However, the essay further argues that Esther uses the third-person narration to ventriloquize the voice of her mother, Lady Dedlock, in an effort to provide herself with the emotional support otherwise denied her. Readers may better understand Esther’s ventriloquism of the third-person narration by tracing how it mirrors her early daily ritual with her doll, in which she assumed both narrative positions at once. Object relations and gift theory further show how this dialogue creates a bond between the two narrations. Thus, characters and family structures that appear in the third-person narration and that may appear distant from Esther are actually her meditations on alternative maternal and familial relationships.

Brook Thomas, “The Galaxy , National Literature, and Reconstruction” (pp. 50–81) The North’s victory in the Civil War preserved the Union and led to the abolition of slavery. Reconstruction was a contentious debate about what sort of nation that union of states should become. Published during Reconstruction before being taken over by the Atlantic Monthly , the Galaxy tried, in Rebecca Harding Davis’s words, to be “a national magazine in which the current of thought of every section could find expression.” The Galaxy published literature and criticism as well as political, sociological, and economic essays. Its editors were moderates who aesthetically promoted a national literature and politically promoted reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites along with fair treatment for freedmen. What fair treatment entailed was debated in its pages. Essayists included Horace Greeley, the abolitionist journalist; Edward A. Pollard, author of The Lost Cause (1866); and David Croly, who pejoratively coined the phrase “miscegenation.” Literary contributors included Davis, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, John William De Forest, Julian Hawthorne, Emma Lazarus, Paul Hayne, Sidney Lanier, and Joaquin Miller. Juxtaposing some of the Galaxy ’s literary works with its debates over how the Union should be reimagined points to the neglected role that Reconstruction politics played in the institutionalization of American literary studies. Whitman is especially important. Reading the great poet of American democracy in the context of the Galaxy reveals how his postbellum celebration of a united nation—North, South, East, and West—aligns him with moderate views on Reconstruction that today seem racially reactionary.