Critics have long considered the Victorian sensation novel a difficult genre to define. The thread that connects these seemingly disparate works is class: the sensation novel may be defined as a genre that disrupts a middle-class perspective. The sensation novel forces readers to attend to multiple class perspectives; it aligns the act of reading and piecing together clues with the surveillance of a servant; and it revalues femininity while suggesting that what is perceived as gender is actually a function of class privilege.

Many Victorian commentators, from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin on, saw music as the most primitive of all the arts, an inarticulate precursor of language, and yet many Victorians, particularly towards the end of the century, also saw music as the purest of all art forms. The tremendous tension between these two views meant that music provided, and provides, an ideal way to understand more completely Victorian ideas about evolution, gender, and race in relation to aesthetics, although scholarship on music has only begun to consider those relationships. But as Vernon Lee long ago pointed out, in a series of thoughtful essays about music published in Fraser's Magazine and other periodicals in the 1870s and 1880s, music has always been slower to develop than other arts or fields of study. This is in fact why musicologists speak of “nineteenth-century music,” rather than Victorian music: the Romantic period in music, for example, is starting as the Romantic period in literature had largely ended; the English Musical Renaissance comes after the renaissance period in British literature; and so on. Musicology, likewise, is a comparatively young field, and the study of nineteenth-century British music – long limited to Gilbert and Sullivan, if considered at all – younger yet. Studies of literature that engage with music as an important part of the historical context of a given text depend on developments in musicology for a proper understanding of that context, which is why such works are comparatively few. Why music should be slower to develop than other fields is a question outside the scope of this essay, but the good news is that in the past ten years a number of useful and valuable works of scholarship on nineteenth-century British music have appeared, examining not only neglected composers and musical works, but also performers, concert organizers, music publishers, instruments and their history, and evolutionary, Orientalist, and nationalist discourses about music. This scholarship, valuable in itself, not only expands our knowledge of musicology and cultural history; by pointing out some of the deep connections between literature and music in the Victorian period, such scholarship also suggests new ways to think about literary forms, canon formation, and aesthetic theories.

A drastic shift in British perceptions of China took place between the beginning and end of the nineteenth century. Up through the first decades of the nineteenth century, China and its ideals as well as its art and aesthetic were widely admired. Yet by the end of the century, the discourse surrounding China had become very different: no longer were the Chinese admired for their art or their morals; instead, they were castigated as amoral, pitiless, inscrutable liars. Why and how this change took place has not yet been explored in part because scholars have tended to focus on either the beginning of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, rather than on the years between these periods. Yet those years saw the rise of sinology, which became established as a field of scholarship in precisely the period (from roughly 1870 to 1901) that has so far been neglected. This scholarship, highly specialized though it might seem (and was), was not confined to the Ivory Tower; it made its way to the educated, upper-middle-class reading public through periodicals. If we look at what British periodicals were teaching their readers about China and the Chinese language during this gap period, we can see – perhaps surprisingly – a concerted and earnest effort being made to avoid assumptions that the Chinese need British help and to avoid pro-Christian judgments, in favor of an attempt to learn the workings of the Chinese language as the first step towards understanding the Chinese on their own terms. What scholars learn and what periodicals teach about the Chinese language, however, leads these very same would-be enlightened people, in the end, to see the Chinese as cunning children incapable of complex thought or basic feeling, and therefore incapable of progress or morality. In other words, the increasing British prejudice against the Chinese originated to an important degree in the work of the first scholars of sinology, rather than in the fears of the ignorant or the culturally-marginalized. Examining this process challenges a paradigm dominant in postcolonial studies, in which modern scholars decry the supremacy of Western systems while problematically replicating a narrative in which the concept of Western systemic supremacy is not challenged and the existence of non-Western systems is not acknowledged. In the case of China, the complexity of its written and spoken language systems helped frustrate Western efforts at colonization, and this systemic resistance to Western domination was constructed by Western scholars in such a way as to create and justify sinophobia.