School of English/ Victorian Studies Centre

It is becoming an increasingly accepted critical commonplace that in the Dickens world, a steam boat can become "an enormously magnified insect or antediluvian monster" (Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844) as effortlessly as man can acquire "a good deal of train oil in his system" (Bleak House, 1853). This image of instability, of energetic volatility, encapsulates the "thermo-dynamism" which Jessica Kuskey's article, "Our Mutual Engine," seeks to unleash. Throughout the central Victorian period, discussions of industrialisation constructed the workplace as an imagined space of porous boundaries, wherein the expending of energy and subjectivity migrated between workers, machines, and the industrial landscape itself. Kuskey conceptualises this persistent renegotiation of industrial subjectivity alongside a recycling of the 'waste' implicit in the laws of thermodynamics. The Dickensian characters of Our Mutual Friend are constantly alert, Kuskey argues, to the social pressures placed on them "to exert a constant level of purposeful, well-directed energy" (75). Of course, the nineteenth century was claustrophobically tangled up in a web of energy-laden industrialisation which, in itself, was intimately bound to notions of productive improvement and advancement. In the heat of industrial turmoil, Dickens rapidly came to conceive the self of the industrial age as one whose expending of energy meshed closely to specific scientific, social and economic doctrines. Kuskey's article explains that "mid-century popularizations" of thermodynamics encouraged Dickens to grapple with such theories in relation to wider cultural and ideological contexts. As a result, he produced a vast corpus of periodical and literary works which energetically bubbled with scientific and social fizz. The Dickensian interrelations between 'the scientific' and the social are initially explored by Kuskey in relation to Smilesean discourse. For Samuel Smiles, explains Kuskey, "energy and character are exhibited by the dutiful pursuit of socially useful work." According to Kuskey, Smiles's theories interestingly reunite the "cultural conception of energy-the inner will to work hard and push through-with the emerging scientific definition of work meaning mechanical effect" (76). Rather than reading Our Mutual Friend's overall preoccupation with 'waste' in the highly popularised contexts of Victorian filth and sanitary reform, Kuskey resituates the novel alongside the emerging scientific theories surrounding work, waste, and energy. She argues that the novel's fixation with the "economic and moral stakes of wastefulness" are part of "a scientifically inflected work/waste dichotomy" (77). Building upon Ted Underwood's important analysis of early thermodynamics in Romantic and early-Victorian literary culture, Kuskey explores how Thermodynamic science leapt to prominence so rapidly in nineteenth-century culture because "Victorian scientists, lecturers, and journalists believed that it ratified a productivist conception of industry they already cherished" (78). Putting forth her Marxistoriented interpretations, Kuskey explains that the new science of energy was "fundamentally shaped by ideologies including the necessity of hard work, maximization of efficiency, and the moral imperative against waste, all of which predisposed scientists to see the work of an engine in economic and moral terms" (79).

Professor Moriarty, like the great detective Sherlock Holmes, has been one of the bastions of English literature ever since his first mention in Conan Doyle's story 'The Final Problem', published in 'The Strand' in December 1893. Holmes and Moriarty are two sides of the same coin, and their personalities go beyond what we would call humane. Although Conan Doyle may have originally meant them to be this way, in this characterisation things are not as simple as black and white or good and evil. Despite his fall down Reichenbach, Moriarty has emerged from the waves of the Aar triumphant, returning again and again through the ages to rival Holmes' intellect, in various adaptations and reworkings for the screen. This paper will explore the monstrous in Moriarty and how he was constructed from a rough skeleton to one of the most memorable, most sinister criminals the Victorian age has produced. It will explore what is it that makes the most dangerous man in London one of the most monstrous creations Conan Doyle has penned, and how Moriarty's character was developed from a plot device into a rounded character in modern-day adaptations of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

This paper examines the reference to 'Seynt Idiot' in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, a blasphemous caricature of the God of Love which occurs in the first book. It identifies parallels between this epithet and the mock saints found in medieval inversion rituals, especially the continental sermons joyeux and other liturgical parodies. On the basis of these echoes, the paper argues that Seynt Idiot is being used to draw sarcastic parallels between love and the practices of medieval festive culture. The implications of this are discussed in detail, paying particular attention to the attitudes it implies towards the discourse of revelry.

This paper examines the reference to 'Seynt Idiot' in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, a blasphemous caricature of the God of Love which occurs in the first book. It identifies parallels between this epithet and the mock saints found in medieval inversion rituals, especially the continental sermons joyeux and other liturgical parodies. On the basis of these echoes, the paper argues that Seynt Idiot is being used to draw sarcastic parallels between love and the practices of medieval festive culture. The implications of this are discussed in detail, paying particular attention to the attitudes it implies towards the discourse of revelry.

During the medieval and early modern periods, the mock sermon was one of the most widely staged festive rituals. There are records of its performance in most European countries and cultures. But despite its clear popularity in England, few of these texts are extant in English. Fewer still have heen translated in their entirety. To remedy this situation, we provide here a translation of the sixteenthcentury Dutch poem Spotsermoen over Sint Niemand. This piece embodies most of the key features of the mock sermon; the text's rhetorical strategies, its content, and the details it reveals about its performance are all typical of the genre. Thus, the poem is offered as a specimen of the mock sermon's overall conventions and forms.

During the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Low Countries made a series of important contributions to English literature. Through such agents as the printers of Antwerp and Amsterdam, and the movements of Dutch scholars and Calvinist refugees, the Low Countries exerted a continuous impact on the literary culture of England. This article examines the scope of Dutch influence during the English Renaissance, indicates some of its key effects, and provides an overview of existing scholarship on the subject.

In terms of its genre, the Franklin’s Tale is one of Chaucer’s most puzzling texts. It not only presents an Italian novella as a Breton lay, but splices further material from chronicles, saints’ lives and classical and patristic literature into its overall form. This paper aims to deepen the Tale’s complexity by noting the presence of a further, unremarked genre in the text, that of the fabliau. In particular, it pays close attention to the figure of the magician, arguing that this character and his tacitly rationalised sorcery are designed to evoke the rascally clercs escoliers of the French texts, whose trickery often has comparable methods and results. The wider implications of these allusions for interpreting the poem are also considered.

There is a persistent view in criticism which characterizes satirical discourse in Middle English as profoundly conservative. It is routinely asserted that satirical discourse was capable only of simple moral pronouncements, and that it was predisposed to champion the ideals and conventions it drew upon. The article challenges this conception. It revisits some of the earliest examples of satire in English to counter such a view, paying particular attention to the texts collected in Jesus College MS 29, and the Harley MSS 913 and 2253. Through examining these sources, a range of more scurrilous and defamatory devices are identified. Far from being inflexibly censorious, satire is found to have a strong element of deprecation and deflation in its arsenal of techniques. The article also reviews existing scholarship on medieval vernacular satire to suggest how existing conceptions of the literature may be refined, to reflect the findings it reaches.

In 1481, a plea was heard before the Common Bench which shines revealing light on late medieval attitudes towards instruction. A petition was made by a young apprentice against his former master, a hosier at London. The boy complained that he had been forced to abandon his training after a single year, owing to the excessive cruelty he had experienced: he describes frequent "assault and battery against his person, and other trespass," as well as "imprisonment" and general neglect. While these accusations are not unusual in themselves, as the case is merely one of many brought against masters in the period, what makes it significant is its treatment by the court. 1 In delivering his verdict, the presiding judge, Sir Thomas Littleton, took the opportunity to voice some observations on the role of physical coercion in education. He argued "for one to beat his apprentice if he will not look to or attend to his craft" is simply part of the implicit "covenant" between all educators and pupils, adding that "if a schoolmaster might justify it, then my judgement has it that the student [scoler] does not wish to receive his instruction [erudicione]." 2 What these remarks make clear is that the concepts of school-level instruction and physical discipline had converged by the end of the Middle Ages. The beating of schoolboys is not simply expected, but treated as an integral part of education, holding an unassailable place in elementary teaching; it gains the same level of authority as a legal precedent, standing as an established fact which can be used to interpret other events.

While the allegorical drama of the Dutch rederijkers has received increasing attention from English-speaking critics, much less attention has been paid to the refreinen that often accompanied the plays on festival occasions. This is despite the fact that the refreins were held in high esteem by the rederijkers themselves, and even regarded as the greatest culmination of their literary principles. To redress this oversight, we offer fresh translations of three of these texts, taken from one of the most noted of the rhetorijckfeesten. This is the first time that these poems have been translated into English.

Alongside her meditations on Jewish practice and history, Grace Aguilar (1816-47) also wrote stories devoid of Jewish content and advised her female readers to 'look to [their] English Bibles'. Consequently, contemporaries and critics have claimed that her work assimilates Evangelical literary models. The trope of women's reading in her fiction, however, and the theorisation of this practice in The Spirit of Judaism (1842) indicates that for Aguilar, valorising women's capacity for textual interpretation works to defend against apostasy, thus improving the status of the Jews in Protestant England.