A missing Indian diamond. A scaffold in New England. A map of the African interior written on a potsherd. A Jamaican vampire bat. A portrait of an Italian castrato. These are some of the props I have chosen to analyse inQueer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. The props themselves are only pieces of a larger tropology where queer sexuality, transgender bodies, racial otherness and Gothic horror intersect. Each item signifies a site of crisis as well as a site of transgression in Victorian culture. The Western authorities who search for the unusual Indian diamond cannot find it; rather,...

Wilkie Collins’sThe Woman in Whitewas first published in serial form between November 1859 and August 1860 in Charles Dickens’sAll The Year Round. The action of the novel takes place in and around 1848 leading up to 1851. Eight years later, Collins once again employed his extremely popular split narrative form forThe Moonstone, serialized from January–August 1868. Here, as well, Collins places the action of the novel in a previous time: 1799 and 1848–9. The stories take place within two years of one another, but they are haunted by two particular events that occurred in...

In an 1897 book of essays entitledWomen Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of AppreciationsEdna Lyall writes the following about Elizabeth Gaskell:

Few writers, we think, have exercised a more thoroughly wholesome influence over their readers than Mrs Gaskell. Her books, with their wide human sympathies, their tender comprehension of human frailty, their bright flashes of humour and their infinite pathos, seem to plead with us to love one another. Through them all we seem to hear the author’s voice imploring us to ‘seize the day’ and to ‘make friends’.¹

For Lyall and the other authors of...

When Henry Rider Haggard’s She was first serialized inThe Graphicin October 1886–January 1887, it entered into a cultural milieu marked by heightened British worries about imperialism and national decline that took the form of well-documented moral panic about all manner of racial otherness, gender diversity and queer sexualities. The gender and sexual panic were, as I will argue, specifically queer rather than homosexual, as they were infused with anxieties about shifting – read as morally degenerating – gender roles and identities that went beyond the specificity of male/male or female/female sexuality to suggest genderqueer, transgender and even...

To say that the vampires Carmilla and Harriet embody queer desire is, perhaps, the least surprising interpretation of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’sCarmilla(1871–2) and Florence Marryat’sThe Blood of the Vampire(1897).² The more interesting possibilities in exploring these vampire tales reside in their authors’ tentative tone toward the intersections of queer desire, miscegenation and imperial anxiety. Unlike mainstream authors Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell – who utilize Gothic as a genre to make somewhat surprising and subversive arguments that ask for the audience’s sympathy toward queer, racially mixed and otherwise socially marginalized characters – Le Fanu and...

Between the years 1885 and 1895 a series of events took place in London that fixed the male homosexual as a criminal in the British public imagination.² In 1885, the infamous Labouchère Amendment (Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act introduced by the Radical MP Henry Labouchère) was added to the criminal code, making homosexual sex between men in both public and private illegal.³ In 1889, the publishing world became obsessed with the Cleveland Street scandal which started as a police raid on a male homosexual brothel off Tottenham Court Road, involving young male postal delivery workers who earned...