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Family occupies a central position in (neo-)Victorian fiction. Yet, the ideal nuclear family myth is often contested, since this institution tends to be portrayed as dysfunctional, broken and oppressive. By contrast, alternative reconfigurations of the heteronormative household in neo-Victorianism encourage an empathic and tolerant engagement to both Victorian and contemporary eccentric family models. The Netflix original series The Irregulars (2021) follows this pattern by placing a gang of Othered outcasts rejected by their families at the centre of the narrative. In this article, I analyse how the series subverts the traditional conceptualization of the Victorian family and proposes, instead, an alternative concept of community: the neo-Victorian family of choice.

Neo-Victorian fiction has been concerned with historically oppressed and traumatised characters from the 1990s onwards (Llewellyn 2008). More recently, neo-Victorianism on screen has shifted its attention to the figure of the perpetrator and their unresolved guilt, as in the TV series Penny Dreadful (Logan 2014-2016) or Taboo (Knight, Hardy and Hardy 2017-present). However, perpetrator trauma is an under-theorised field in the humanities (Morag 2018), neo-Victorian studies included. This article analyses Taboo as a neo-Victorian postcolonial text that explores the trauma of its protagonist James Delaney, an imperial perpetrator who transported and sold African slaves in the Middle Passage for the East India Company. Although the series is not set in the Victorian period, neo-Victorianism is here understood as fiction expanding beyond the historical boundaries of the Victorian era and that presents the long nineteenth century as synonymous with the empire (Ho 2012: 4). Thus, I argue that postcolonial texts like Taboo should be considered neo-Victorian since they are set in the nineteenth century to respond to and contest (neo-)imperial practices. However, neo-Victorian postcolonialism offers ambivalent representations of the British Empire, as it simultaneously critiques and reproduces its ideologies (Ho 2012; Primorac 2018). This article examines the ways in which Taboo follows this contradictory pattern, since it seemingly denounces the imperial atrocity of the slave trade through Delaney’s perpetrator trauma, while simultaneously perpetuating it through his future colonizing trip to the Americas. Hence, Delaney is portrayed as an anti-hero in the series, given that he is both the enemy and the very product of the British Empire.

(Neo-)Victorian literature offers contradictory conceptualisations of the nuclear family. While it usually revolves around traditional heteroparental households, at the same time it portrays them as fragmented and deeply flawed. Guillermo del Toro’s film Crimson Peak (2015) builds on domestic traumas, the dysfunctional family and the supernatural, three recurrent tropes in (neo-)Victorian Gothic fiction. My main aim is to explore how Del Toro exploits the incest plotline in order to subvert preconceived views on the idealised Victorian family. I first analyse the ancestral family house and the mother figure as the loci of family traumas. I then move on to examine the Sharpe siblings’ incestuous relationship from a threefold perspective involving ethics, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, thereby showing that Del Toro exposes nineteenth-century family traumas that are still present in contemporary societies, so that audiences may become aware of these social issues and even take an active stance against them. La literatura (neo)victoriana ofrece conceptualizaciones contradictorias de la familia nuclear, ya que generalmente gira en torno a hogares tradicionales heteroparentales pero los presenta como fragmentados y profundamente disfuncionales. La película Crimson Peak (2015) del director Guillermo del Toro se basa en tres motivos recurrentes en la ficción gótica (neo) victoriana, los traumas domésticos, la familia disfuncional y lo sobrenatural. Mi objetivo principal es explorar cómo Del Toro utiliza la trama del incesto para subvertir las visiones preconcebidas e idealizadas sobre la familia victoriana. En primer lugar, analizo la casa ancestral y la figura materna como origen de los traumas familiares, para a continuación examinar la relación incestuosa entre los hermanos Sharpe desde un enfoque triple: ético, estético y psicoanalítico. Sobre esta base, argumento que Del Toro representa traumas familiares del siglo XIX que continúan siendo relevantes en la sociedad actual, con el objetivo de que los espectadores puedan tomar conciencia de estos problemas sociales e incluso adoptar una postura activa contra los mismos.

In this essay I will focus on the role played by hair jewellery, a widespread craft in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American context, in neo-Victorian literature and culture. I will consider hair jewels as objects that are remnants of the Victorian past, but also as personal items that evoke affective responses through the senses. In this take on (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, I will consider the entanglement of subjects and objects, human remains (hair) and jewels, past and present, death and life in contemporary renditions of the Victorian craftwork of hair jewellery. Finally, I will argue that this fictionalisation of Victorian material traces allows us to mediate on the links and associations between the Victorian past and our (sensorial) responses to them, and that it opens up the ways to interrogate the affective relations between subjects and objects, the past and the present, then and now, as well as their impact upon our future.

This article first sketches out the legacy of The Woman in White and the sensation novel of the 1860s from the late-Victorian period to the present day. Then, in the second part of the essay, Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith (2002) is used as an exemplary text which illustrates some of the ways in which contemporary fiction has engaged with the Victorian sensation novel: after exploring Waters’s allusions to The Woman in White and discussing the politics of pastiche, as well as the concept of character ‘migration’, this article demonstrates that Waters’s appeal to the sense of touch borrows from Wilkie Collins’s tactile poetics, in order to invite us to read haptically, that is to say, to reconnect with a form of reading which is embodied and makes the Victorian past a palpable, substantial part of our contemporary selves.

The presence of Empire in the Victorian period and its aftermath has become a new trope in neo-Victorian studies, introducing a postcolonial approach to the re-writing of the Victorian past. This, combined with the metaphor of the sea as a symbol of British colonial and postcolonial maritime power, makes of Joseph O’Connor’s novel Star of the Sea a story of love, vulnerability and identity. Set in the winter of 1847, it tells the story of the voyage of a group of Irish refugees travelling to New York trying to escape from the Famine. The colonial history of Ireland and its long tradition of English dominance becomes the setting of the characters’ fight for survival. Parallels with today’s refugees can be established after Ireland’s transformation into an immigration country. Following Judith Butler’s and Sarah Bracke’s notions of vulnerability and resistance together with ideas about ‘the other’ in postcolonial neo-Victorianism, this article aims to analyse the role of Empire in the construction of an Irish identity associated with poverty and disease, together with its re-emergence and reconstruction through healing in a contemporary globalised scenario. For this purpose, I resort to Edward Said’s and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ideas about imperialism and new imperialism along with Elizabeth Ho’s concept of ‘the Neo-Victorian-at-sea’ and some critics’ approaches to postcolonial Gothic. My main contention throughout the text will be that vulnerability in resistance can foster healing.

This article examines the reworking of Victorian beauty in the visual culture of post-war Britain. Although the work of post-war modernization and reconstruction was regarded as a symbolic break with the nineteenth-century past, the Victorian age continued to haunt the nation in the years following the end of the war, generating its own distinctive fascination and beauty. Focusing on an historical melodrama, Pink String and Sealing Wax (UK; dir. Robert Hamer, 1945), the article examines the narrative and its star, Googie Withers, in order to examine the role, meaning, and appeal of Victorianism and Victorian beauty in the post-war years.

En este artículo me centro en el papel que desempeña la joyería realizada con cabello humano, un arte muy extendido en el siglo XIX y en el contexto anglonorteamericano, en la literatura y en la cultura neo-victorianas. Analizaré estas joyas como objetos que provienen del pasado victoriano, pero también como artículos personales que estimulan respuestas emocionales y afectivas a través de los sentidos. En esta aproximación al neo-Victorianismo, me ocupo del entramado e imbricación que se crea entre sujeto y objeto, entre restos humanos (el pelo) y las joyas, entre el pasado y el presente, entre la muerte y la vida en versiones contemporáneas del arte victoriano de la joyería realizada con cabello humano. En definitiva, mi argumento gira en torno a la capacidad de las huellas materiales de la época victoriana de mediar entre el pasado victoriano y nuestras respuestas sensoriales ya que nos permiten dilucidar las relaciones afectivas entre sujeto y objeto, el pasado y el presente, así como su influencia e impacto sobre nuestro futuro. In this essay I will focus on the role played by hair jewellery, a widespread craft in the nineteenthcentury Anglo-American context, in neo-Victorian literature and culture. I will consider hair jewels as objects that are remnants of the Victorian past, but also as personal items that evoke affective responses through the senses. In this take on (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, I will consider the entanglement of subjects and objects, human remains (hair) and jewels, past and present, death and life in contemporary renditions of the Victorian craftwork of hair jewellery. Finally, I will argue that this fictionalisation of Victorian material traces allows us to mediate on the links and associations between the Victorian past and our (sensorial) responses to them, and that it opens up the ways to interrogate the affective relations between subjects and objects, the past and the present, then and now, as well as their impact upon our future.