Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International

This essay looks at Evelyn De Morgan’s strange, highly allegorical paintings c. 1890 and identifies their symbolic mode as invested in that of algebraic, mathematical, or symbolic logic. It identifies new intellectual networks and resources of De Morgan’s, including William Stanley Jevons’s writings from the 1870s, and makes the case for taking the strangeness of her visual mode seriously.

This chapter looks at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph 'Maud' (c. 1874) from her photobook illustrating Alfred Tennyson’s 'Idylls of the King' and other poems. Through close reading of its source text (Tennyson’s 1855 poem 'Maud'), sustained analysis of Cameron’s aestheticist photograph, and careful attention to the contemporaneous botanical writings of Charles Darwin, this chapter draws out the idyllism of Cameron’s 'Maud'. Its central focus is the ambiguities at the heart of Cameron’s photographic idyll, in which human and plant are entangled in an eroticized embrace. Clingy tendrils bind unstable subjects together, enabling potentially pleasurable yet certainly unsettling loopings and reversals of desire, agency, and will. Subjectivity is dispersed across the vegetal agents of the garden, ‘nature’ speaking multiply in feminine voices (lily, rose) to express desire, queerly, for Maud. Moving between analyses of photographic process, poetic voice, and scientific findings, this chapter hones in on the dispersals and confusions of the idyllic mode. In identifying how Cameron’s photographic idyll enables the interpenetration and even confusion of categories such as pain and pleasure, death and life, real and ideal, this chapter recovers the horror at the heart of the aestheticist idyll.

This essay explores how English Aestheticist art of the 1870s drew inspiration from Charles Darwin to generate early visualisations of queer ecologies. Julia Margaret Cameron, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones were attuned to Darwin’s queer undercurrents—including a generative unsettling of straight teleologies and imperatives to reproductive futurity—which they set to work in photographs, paintings, and drawings of plant-human entanglements. Their art mobilised ideas about the transformative power of unbounded desire, exploring how human and other-than-human forms were enmeshed by it. The aesthetic becomes a way to grasp—to luxuriate—in the unruly queerness of life itself.

Emma Merkling reviews 'Modern Spiritualism and Scottish Art: Scots, Spirits and Séances, 1860-1940', by Michelle Foot (2023).

This review first appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 84(4), pp. 244–248, and is reproduced here with permission.