This handbook is an invaluable resource about Victorian literature, art, and culture which challenges its readers to ponder perplexing questions about how and why some scandals were perpetrated and propagated in the nineteenth century while others were not, and what the controversies reveal about the human condition.

Brenda Ayres is retired from full-time residential teaching but currently teaches nineteenth-century English literature and professional writing online for several universities.

Sarah E. Maier is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick.

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Let's Talk Scandal

Brenda Ayres

Part 1: Scandalous Victoriana

Chapter 1: The Afterlives of Victorian Scandals

Lesley A. Hall

Chapter 2: "Her only fear is convention":

The Bohemian Girl in Victorian Art and Life

Anne Anderson, Bohemians in Paris, Anglo-Bohemia

Chapter 3: Reading Between the Lines:

"Town Jottings" from the Savage Club in the Brighton Guardian, 1877

Catherine Layton

Chapter 4: Scandalous Stupor:

Chloroform and Robbery in Victorian Periodicals

Ashlee Simon

Chapter 5: Suicide as Scandal:

Representations from Victorian Life and Art

Catherine J. Golden

Chapter 6: Scandalous Women Wearing Cloaks of Religion

Brenda Ayres

Chapter 7: The Darwin Scandal

Tony Schwab

Part 2: Scandalous Parties

Chapter 8: Victorian Atheists: Cultivating Scandal as a Way of Life

David Nash

Chapter 9: Scandals in a Religious Sect: Agapemone

Catherine Layton

Chapter 10: "A Scandalous and Painful Case": Marriage, Libel, and the Church, 1873-1895

Ginger Frost

Chapter 11: The Cause Célèbre of the Year, If Not the Decade:

May, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland

Catherine Layton

Chapter 12: Regina v. Dunn:

Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts and the Irish Annoyance

Daniel Stuart

Chapter 13: A Poor Gamble:

The Disastrous Elopement of the "Pocket Venus" (Lady Florence Paget)

Catherine Layton

Chapter 14: A "Voice from the Grave":

Lady Flora Hastings, Queen Victoria, and the Scandal of Pregnancy

Suzanne Daly

Chapter 15: Poisonous Words:

Criminal Rhetoric and the Trials of Mary Ann Cotton and Florence Maybrick

Katherine Anne Gilbert and Cheryl Blake Price

Chapter 16: "I am a woman all alone": The Case of Mrs. Manning

Catherine Layton

Chapter 17: Lady Lincoln and the Lesser Life of the 1850 Lincoln Divorce

Gail Savage

Chapter 18: Women in the Military and Their Heraldry in the Press

Claire Cookson-Hills

Chapter 19: Virtue v. Heroism:

Kate Dickinson's Case Against Colonel Valentine Baker

Catherine Layton

Chapter 20: Monstrous Martyrdom:

The Trials of Oscar Wilde

Tom Ue and Aaron Eames

Part 3: Scandalous Reading and Delightfully Despicable Novels

Chapter 21: Edith Cooper's Sin:

Mapping the Wilful Bodies of Michael Field

Sharon Bickle

Chapter 22: "Let us adore spilled blood":

Swinburne and the Scandal of Poems and Ballads

Michael Craske

Chapter 23: Edith J. Simcox and the Scandal of Queer Form

Kellie Holzer

Chapter 24: Scandalous Exogamy in Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister

Lauren Cameron

Chapter 25: Ouida:

Catherine Layton

Chapter 2The Scandalous Deconstruction of Victorian Morals in Anna Lombard:

What Made Victoria(ns) Cross?

Purna Banerjee

Chapter 27: Daddy's Little Angel in the House:

The Managing Daughter and the Incest Taboo

Emily Dotson

Chapter 28: The Nineteenth-Century Sex Worker: Avoiding Surveillance, Stereotypes, and Scandal

Hollie Geary-Jones

Chapter 29: Homosexual Scandal and Late-Victorian Social Reform

S. Brooke Cameron

Chapter 30: Scandal and Degeneracy at the Fin de Siècle

Sarah E. Maier

Index