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This essay examines the literary career of Anglo-Irish peer Lewis Strange Wingfield (1842-1891) in relation to the rise of investigative journalism and Victorian debates over the treatment of mental illness. Situating his work in the context of the first covert investigations into asylums in Britain and the United States, it focuses on Wingfield's use of disguise to infiltrate a private London asylum for the purpose of researching his novel Gehenna; or, Havens of Unrest (1882). Wingfield's pioneering experiment in undercover authorship, we argue, sheds new light on investigative journalism's impact on both the form and thematics of the nineteenth-century realist novel.

This essay examines the impact of James Greenwood's “A Night in a Workhouse by an Amateur Casual” (1866) on the emergence of investigative journalism. Whereas the American press is often credited with the invention of undercover reporting, this essay argues that Greenwood's exposé established undercover reporting as a global genre and exerted a lasting influence on both its terminology and methods.

The following essay offers a close reading of an obscure imperial short story, Gertrude Page’s ‘A Terror That Saved’ (1912), in order to question the assumptions that short fiction about imperial adventure is necessarily masculine, and that short stories with empire settings are primarily vehicles for colonial ideology. When the story in question was written, its author had recently moved from Britain to Rhodesia, a colony whose owner-administrator, the British South Africa Company (BSAC), had strong financial and political incentives for promoting itself to settlers, investors, and the reading public in Britain. Even so, I argue, it would be a mistake to view this tale as being ‘about’ empire in any simple sense, to infer that its huge audience was actively endorsing imperialism, or to equate its generic conventionality and moral conservatism with a static, traditional, and collective worldview. Instead, I draw on Richard Ohmann’s landmark analysis of magazine short stories to sketch an alternative framework within which to understand the popularity of such short stories and to reconstruct the ways in which they were likely read, in particular by women.

This essay presents the discovery of the American serialization of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim in New York’s Evening Telegramin 1903. This ‘lost’ serialization, it argues, invites a new perspective on Conrad’s early career by foregrounding the role of newspaper serialization and syndication in establishing his literary standing. After surveying the principal differences in the respective reading experiences of the periodical versus the book, it concludes by proposing that the prominence of women among Conrad’s first audiences requires us to reassess the basis for his success in North America and elsewhere.

This article seeks to challenge current understandings of Conrad's status as a maritime writer by considering his many treatments of the sea not as fictionalized versions of his personal experiences as a sailor but as a sustained attempt to reimagine the sea as a literary object. As the earliest reviews of Typhoon attest, contemporaries regarded Conrad's evocation of the sea as unparalleled in both its strangeness and its verisimilitude. This conundrum, I propose, derives from Conrad's desire to recover for literature a maritime space which, as he saw it, had become disenchanted (in Weber's sense) by its mediation in early twentieth-century culture. Indeed, Typhoon, it is argued, was inspired by and in key respects modelled upon Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), a novel that had been readily available to Conrad in its Polish serialization in Warsaw's Gazeta Polska in 1870–71.

The pairing of Congo and utopia seems wilfully perverse in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism. The Congo Free State was the political outcome of a colonial discourse that represented Africa as the antithesis of civilization, a view subsequently reinforced by the sensational expose by Edmund Morel and others of the regime's own reliance upon coercion and violence. And yet, as this essay shows, the Congo has a long history as the object of utopian thought in fiction. Surveying this overlooked sub-genre of fantasy, I argue that the representation of the Congo by writers such as William Mayo, David Ker, William Le Queux, John Brisben Walker, and especially William Thomas Stead reveals not only the unique status of this colonial space in the European imagination but invites us to revisit the ideological underpinnings of colonial literature more generally.