In her introduction to this collection of essays the editor argues persuasively that we stand as heirs to Victorianism whilst having been deprived of our historical origins. If we deny or neglect historical process, in her view, we exist in a ‘Real’ in which ‘no room for change is allowed, as all origins have been erased’. By calling up a primarily Foucauldian genealogical model of investigation, it is suggested, we may begin to understand the production of texts as a process in the projection of individual selfhood. These are significant issues; as the ‘other’ of the Victorian period it is undeniable that we have manipulated nineteenth-century discursive practices to produce hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural ‘monuments’, and this collection goes some way to laying bare these structures of feeling. Thus the essays address a range of cultural moments which pertinently re-examine or stage significant questions; notable essays include a re-reading of Veblen’s leisure-class theory which has suffered too readily from Frankfurt School dismissal (Kirill Thompson); an exemplary account of the Victorian opium trade (Andrew Blake); a nicely articulated consideration of the cottage-ideal (in which Karen Sayer productively revisits the concerns of her authoritative study, Country Cottages); the technologies of nineteenth-century publishing (Alexis Weedon), and postmodern Victorian fictions (Agnieszka Golda). A. Loudermilk contributes a highly entertaining and idiosyncratic account of the American children’s writer Eugene Field, which opens up areas of iconoclasm and illicit sexuality in these seemingly innocent texts, and Ana Moya productively compares class filiations in Dickens’s Great Expectations and Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 film version.

Overall We the ‘Other’ Victorians offers the reader some thought-provoking individual readings of the Victorian cultural ‘heritage’, but it is sometimes hard to discern the unifying critical principles claimed by the editor in what is essentially a series of individual readings and responses. It might be added that proof-reading is regrettably slipshod.

Roger Ebbatson (Loughborough University)

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